Programming examples for Superstar

[rickyniec]

I recently purchased 5 CCPs to create a 20 string X 25 light megatree. I knew I needed a tool to program 500 channels since 64 kept me pretty busy. So, I decided to look at Superstar versus Nutcracker. After watching a few of the tutorials for both tools, I had a 'a-ha' moment.

 

Nutcracker is an effects generator! You can modify the effects, but you cannot do something as simple as turning on 10 red lights on a string. I decided right then I needed to use Superstar!!

 

So, I have watched the tutorials and looked at the demos/clipboards. I have also seen people in this forum describing how to get an effect like snowflakes using Superstar.

 

I would like to know if anyone has explained how to get the same effects as Nutcracker using Superstar? 

I will list a few that I would like to use:

 

Bars - rings of lights (you specify how many rows of each color) moving up, down, toward halfway point, away from halfway up the tree.

 

Garlands - lights dropping from the top of the tree and filling it up to the top.

 

Spirals - I have seen how to do a spiral, but how would you do something like , 3 blue spirals, 3 red spirals (120 degrees around the tree), and 3 green spirals (240 degrees from the blue spirals) at the same time.

 

I know there is a learning curve here, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if this is common stuff everyone knows how to do. 

 

Thanks

[BrianBruderer]

As you say, Nutcracker generates some really cool effects and they are very good for "background" effects that are not necessarily synchronized to the music.

 

SuperStar is designed to create tightly synchronized effects. Scenes, morphs, images, and text give you the building blocks to create a vast variety of effects and you can generate some cool Instant Sequences, but to create some of the effects you mention is difficult.

 

Bars - With morphs you can move one line from any start location to any end location. But to do groups, or rings of lights in a pattern like you describe requires that you define the movement of each bar.

 

Garlands - It sounds like you are describing the effect where a pixels randomly drop down a column and stop when they hit the top of a pile of pixels. This is a cool effect, but in SuperStar it would require that you define the movement of each pixel which would be impractical to do, in theory you could do it, but it would be so time consuming you wouldn't want to do ti. So the short answer is that currenlty it is not practical to do this effect in SuperStar

 

Spirals - Spirals on a 360 degreee tree are really just a slanted line that is moving around the tree. In SuperStar, define a morph with 0 time length for the tail, and it will be a line. You can specify the color for the line and the start location and end location. So the effect you describe can be done fairly easily and once you have created it for one rotation around the tree you can copy/paste the effect as many times as you want, and you can use "group modify" to change a group of lines to any color you want.

 

Other effects - I am currently working on adding "smooth" effects which is intended to make it possible to easily create some of the effects like what Nutcracker does. The next release of SuperStar will contain "shockwave" and "spiral". I will add more as I have time to do them.

[rickyniec]

Thank you for the quick feedback. I'm looking forward to learning and programming with Superstar.

[Melvin Stoddard]

Brian do you have a timeline on when you will release the shockwave and spiral effects. I would like to use them this year but believe it or not with the number of songs I have I would like to have it soon.

[BrianBruderer]

There will first be a beta release and then released to the public after that. It is hard to commit to any specific dates. I want it out as soon as possible also. My target has always been to have it out before summer.