Visualizer Help?

Beam for Live
1

Hi, It could be just me, but I think the directions for the visualizer and capture are rather lacking. I can’t connect Capture to Beam because Capture 2021 doesn’t give me the option of ArtNet under external universe. Any ideas?

2

Hi Gary,

While we have been aware of this issue, your post led us to investigate this further and start working on some improvements that should make connecting to visualizers and other Art-Net applications running on the same computer more user-friendly. So thank you for reaching out - that’s very valuable feedback! For now:

  • In order to send (unicast) Art-Net to Capture via the 127.0.0.1 loopback address, Capture must be started before Beam.
  • Alternatively, you can send Art-Net to Capture by specifying a broadcast IP address as Art-Net output in Beam - then the order of execution should not matter (though keep in mind Art-Net packets will be sent to all the devices within the same subnet).
    You can read about broadcasting here and use a tool like this one to find the broadcast address.
    On macOS, your IP address and subnet mask can be found by going to System Preferences → Network → select the relevant network interface → Advanced → TCP/IP. If your IPv4 address is 192.168.1.90 and subnet mask is 255.255.255.0, the broadcast IP address will be 192.168.1.255.

Please share if the solutions above work for you. We will also add a note about this in our manual.
Besides that, as Capture is software developed by another company and a universe on its own, we only provide the instructions necessary to run the demo set, get you started as quickly as possible, and merely suggest it as a good option for lighting visualization.
If you are interested in learning Capture in-depth, their video tutorials and the Reference Manual are a good place to start.
With this in mind, if there is anything else specific about the Beam <-> Capture workflow that you think could be better explained, please let us know.

Hope this helps!
Luka

3

Make sure you are using Capture and NOT Capture Student edition. they’ve nerfed the newest 2022 student version pretty hard.

Once you have the right version, it does take a bit to understand. So he IS right! However, once I found out I was using the wrong version. It was dirt simple to setup the demo following the instructions provided. Honest mistake and NOT showsync’s fault in my case.

I’ve been testing out the possibility of using the Unreal Engine as my visualizer. As they have included a DMX plugin since version 4.26. Given that you can pretty much program any fixture you can imagine or modify/customize assets that have already been created. Also, the fact that it’s 100% free to use & has one of the largest user bases on the planet helps. They have a myriad of documentation & tutorials on how to integrate DMX512 through Artnet into a project.

Still, as I’ve experienced thus far. decently steep learning curve. Same as capture. But, a free program is always better for experiments than the lure of having to pay money to get rid of a 90 min timer.

4

Hi all,

I finally got this to work but only by doing both instructions Luka gave.

  1. Start up Capture, then start up Beam
  2. Change the connecting IP on both programs to the wifi IP (not localhost) and then changing the last digit to 255 (ie. x.x.x.255)

Second universe, though recognized by Capture, doesn’t seem to respond yet but that might also be me. Another question I have though: does the student edition not allow any artnet? I only need some very basic lights to run but would love to save my project…

5

Thank you for sharing your experience with this so far. As discussed in the other thread (answering here too, for anyone else that might find this thread on its own), broadcasting will likely always work, but it is not the suggested default method of connecting the two applications, as it may impair network (and visualisation) performance.

The currently suggested steps (see the other thread for a more detailed explanation):

  1. If you previously started the two programs in the opposite order as in step 2, quit both. Simply quitting both programs, then restarting them in the right order is usually already enough, if not (in case the quitted application doesn’t release the bound port), restarting the OS and repeating should fix the issue.
  2. Start Capture, then start Beam.
  3. In Beam Preferences select ArtNet output and specify 127.0.0.1 or 0.0.0.0 (not localhost) as the output address.

If you or anyone else is still unable to make this work using these exact steps, please let me know - I am happy to schedule a video-call and have a look at your configuration.

In regards to the “second universe”, please refer to the post in the other thread.

Capture Student Edition does support Art-Net (an unlimited number of universes). @miro successfully used it with Beam to make this video. Please let us know if you need help with setting this up.