Removing Blank Rows from Grid

[Steven]

I'm playing with the new ability to to work with more than 1200 channels at once (thank you Light-O-Rama). I have a 24x50 tree and a 6-channel star, as shown here:

I created a morph that goes from the bottom row to the top. The trouble is that in the grid there are a bunch of blank rows between the pixel branches and the star, so the morph has a pause while it is going through those rows. I believe the blank rows are there because of how I created the star prop, in which I used a custom shape:

When SuperStar is launched from S5 Sequencer, it seems it filters out the duplicate channels, leaving blanks. This makes it look good in the visualizer, but it messes up the morph.

Any suggestions on how to solve this problem?

[k6ccc]

Has a lot to do with why I don't use custom layouts.  More trouble than they are worth in my opinion.  Some others will disagree with that opinion.

 

[Steven]

12 hours ago, k6ccc said:

Has a lot to do with why I don't use custom layouts.  More trouble than they are worth in my opinion.  

I hear you. I am willing to redo the prop, but I couldn't find an existing shape that would work. Any ideas?

[k6ccc]

2 hours ago, Steven said:

I hear you. I am willing to redo the prop, but I couldn't find an existing shape that would work. Any ideas?

One thing to keep in mind.  There is almost no need for the prop to LOOK like reality in the Preview.  It is only a requirement that the channels are correct and that YOU know what it is supposed to be.  For example if you have a six RGB channel thing, you could put that in the Preview as simply six dots - as long as YOU know what those dots represent.  Granted, you are likely not going to make it quite that generic, but you could.

 

[BrianBruderer]

With "Custom" shapes you first define how the prop looks, just as you have done.

If you want to have control of where the lights are on the sequencing grid then do the following:

1) In Preview design, highlight the custom shape

2) Click on the "Edit" menu and select "Copy Prop to Advanced Shape"

3) Double click on the advanced shape that was just created. Click on "Edit Advanced Buffer Layout"

The numbers that you set will define where the lights are in the "Buffer." The buffer is the same thing as the sequencing grid in superstar

 

 

[Steven]

Thanks! The "Advanced Shape" was the answer I was looking for.

The SuperStar sequencing grid cannot show multiple locations for the same pixel number. My star uses the same pixel 5 or 10 times. When I repeat the same pixel multiple times in the buffer, which place is used for the location of that pixel in SuperStar's sequencing grid?

[BrianBruderer]

For example, if you have channels 1, 2, and 3 assigned to a pixel in your prop, are you saying that when channels 1, 2, and 3 are used, it lights up 5 different pixels?

Or does your star use traditional lights that are not RGB ? 

[Steven]

My star uses 50 dumb RGB bulbs wired to a small DMX controller with 18 (3 x 6) channels. When I built it 7 years ago, pixels were more expensive and not as reliable, and I had some dumb RGB bulbs laying around. If I were to rebuild it today, I would use pixels of course.

[BrianBruderer]

I went into Preview design and made a custom shape and chose "dumb string" on the left hand side. I then tried to do "copy prop to advanced shape" and got a message saying you can only make a copy of an advanced shape if it is pixels.

What I would do is make a line segment and choose "dumb string" and you can specify how many lights are in the dumb pixel. Note that this just defines how many dots the software is going to use to represent the dumb string.

You can then lay out the line segments to make a star shape.

Now make a group and add the line segments to the group. Define the arrangement as "horizontal stack align bottoms" or "horizontal stack align tops"

[Steven]

I figured it out. I used Advanced Shape, made the buffer 24x12, and put pixel channels 1-6 as the left part of the top point of the star. Then I added extra pixels for the other lights, with the correct count (5 or 10 pixels for each channel). I put the additional pixels under or to the right of the others, so that SuperStar would just grab the first row.

Then I went into the layout and moved everything around to the correct place. This took a bit of time, but it looks correct and still works properly in SuperStar.

[BrianBruderer]

Glad you got it to work!