I am evaluating if Beam for Max works for my needs but I’m having problems understanding the beam.tag object and how to adress individual channels.
I made a fixture (Eurolite LED CBB-4 in 12ch mode. It has 4 individual RGB LED PAR lights).
I made 4 cells in the fixture, each cell with 3 ch for Red, Green and Blue.
I have tagged the Cells: PAR1, PAR2, PAR3, PAR4 and if I use “dim $1” messege I can adress them individually.
But how do I adress each color individually?
If I only want to turn on red for PAR1 what should that messege to the beam.tag object look like?
I have tried sending “red $1” and it works sometimes but it also affect other channels so if I pull down the red the blue pops up instead and sometimes it does not work at all.
Is there any documentation for how to adress modulation, cells and color space?
The red message is the right way. What is probably going wrong is how the dim interacts with the separate red, green and blue messages.
The dim message is a bit special in the way that it controls red, green and blue all together. Setting dim to 1.0 is the same as setting red, green and blue to 1.0. If there’s already a color set, dim acts more like a multiplier. The thinking behind this behavior is that you can set a light to a specific color and then set dim = 0.5 to make it less bright, regardless of what color is actually set.
So I wonder if sending the red message works when you make sure that you don’t use the dim message at all.
You can also use the rgb message to set red, green and blue in one go. This is a useful message in combination with Max’s [swatch] object.
Thanks for the explanation, I kind of figured this out and when I set a color with red, green, blue I can indeed control them with “dim”.
But I would still like to find some documentation for this, is that available somewhere?
I only knew about the dim messege from a YouTube video and I haven’t seen any reference, documentation or help file that describe how to use blue, red, green messeges.
For example if I open the “beam.tag” help file there is no list of messeges that are supported like you can usually see for other objects.
In the inspector it just says it has one attribute and that is “tag”.
Is there a complete list of messeges somewhere that I can read?
If I want to control things such as: Pan, tilt, gobo, strobe, zoom, focus, intensity, smoke, rotation, fan-speed and other parameters of various lights and DMX controlled fans and smoke machines what measseges do I use?
Is there a logic for this so I can just look in the *.json file to understand what messege each fixture should react to?
Can I even program this myself when I setup my fixtures?
Are there any other “abstraction messeges” similar to “dim” where one messege works together with other messeges to set the resulting DMX values?