Hi All,
Been playing around with PixelToy for a bit now... have got it hooked up to my ion and manipulating animations from there... Bubbles/ rain/ sonar sweep etc all work well and as expected, however, I can't get the others to work...
I expect this is because there is a required level of interaction ie a click to get the animation working... Is there any way to trigger this interaction from the console itself? I know I can click on the laptop to get it going... but ideally I am wanting to have the Ion working as a standalone.
Also, I havent figured out if you can activate playback from the timeline from Ion?
Sorry for all the questions!
Many thanks,
G.
Hi Gromit,
Ah, yes, for effects that require interaction, you can simulate the interaction from the Ion by controlling the "Touch Mode" parameter. The manual describes it briefly in the DMX Input Map section.
Touch Mode (DMX offset: 25) 0 = Touch Release 1 = Touch Pressed 2 = Touch Press & Release (sent whenever the Touch coordinates change)
So, you can set Touch Mode to 1 to simulate clicking with the mouse and holding the button down. Now you can adjust the Touch X and Touch Y coordinates to simulate dragging the mouse around before setting Touch Mode back to 0 to simulate releasing the mouse button.
For timeline playback, you should be able to set the Timeline Playback Mode parameter to 1 or 2 to trigger the timeline to start playing back. Setting the Timeline Offset parameter to 0 will rewind to the beginning.
Timeline Playback Mode (DMX offset: 1) 0 = Pause 1 = Play Looping 2 = Play Once
Hope that helps :-)
Chris MizerakSoftware EngineerElectronic Theatre Controls
Hi Chris,
Thanks very much for your reply!
I am struggling to see how to control that parameter. Currently I have the pixeltoy show file open on my ion. I am manipulating the various options by selecting one of the 5 channels and then tweaking the parameters through the Focus/colour/beam/image etc. buttons on the top right of the console. Having looked through these I haven't seen the touch mode or timeline playback parameters that you mentioned.
I assume I am controlling the fixtures completely wrong?! Can you help me out?
John.
Hey Gromit,
Sorry, that was probably a bit unclear. Using the sample show file, the parameter names you are interested in are:
"Pan Mode" "Playback Mode 1"
This might be easier to control using the "ML Controls" dock.
Try the following:
1. [Go To Cue] [Out] [Enter] (and wait until everything fades out) 2. Browser>Virtual Controls>ML Controls>Open in CIA (to open the ML Controls dock) 3. [2] [Enter] (to select the 1st layer) 4. Set the "File 1" parameter to 1 (the bouncing balls effect) 5. Now set "Pan Mode" to 1 (when typing, use "01", you can click the "Pan Mode" header in ML Controls to get it on the command line) 6. (Now, in pixelToy, this is simulating a finger or mouse button being pressed and held down) 7. Now set "Pane Mode" back to 0 8. (Now, in pixelToy, this is simulating a finger or mouse button being released and a bouncing ball should drop) 9. You can change the values of "Pan" and "Tilt" to change the coordinates of the simulated press. (Which is more obvious from Pan/Tilt graph in ML Controls) You can use this technique to drag a finger through the water effect too, for example.