Using Fixtures

Fixtures are an important part of a plot. They represent a single physical lighting instrument and are used to create plot drawings and hanging documentation.

Fixtures contain quite a bit more information than metadata: they consist of a data dictionary and a DMX functions list. The data dictionary is simply a key/value list of information about the fixture. The DMX functions list is actually a subvalue of the dictionary and describes how the fixture can be controlled by the DMX protocol.

Creating Fixtures

Because of the complexity of fixtures, especially those that contain DMX functions, it is not recommended to create them from scratch. Instead, create one from a template then edit from there:

Fixture 1 CreateFrom Generic/Parcan

This creates a new fixture from the Generic/Parcan template. This is an included fixture template with Pylux. 1 is the reference given to this new fixture.

Displaying Fixtures

You will have seen the fixture appear in the Fixed Output Pane if you are in the Fixture context. You can also show the fixture in the Dynamic Output Pane by running:

Fixture 1 Display

If you want a bit more information on the fixture, such as additional data tags and DMX functions, you can run:

Fixture 1 About

Setting Attributes

By default fixtures do not have names, but it may be useful to give them a label so they are easily identifiable when you have many fixtures of the same type:

Fixture 1 Set label SL pipe end

Now you will see your fixture has the label SL pipe end, when using both Display and About.

In place of label, you may put any arbitrary tag you like, such as gel, posX etc. For a list of suggested and reserved attributes, see the appendicies.

Cloning Fixtures

Say we have five more PAR cans that we wish to add, we can use the cloning command to quickly add these between references 2 and 6:

Fixture 1 CopyTo 2>6

Notice that whenever you supply a unique reference, you can usually supply a range of references to run the command in bulk.

Get information about all of these by running:

Fixture * About

Assigning DMX Addresses to Fixtures

The data patching a fixture function to a DMX address exists in Registry objects, although it is a fixture command which is used to assign these addresses:

Fixture 1 Patch 0 0

This will patch your fixture in universe 0 at address 0. Of course address 0 does not exist, 0 in this case means, the next available set of addresses where this fixture will fit. This is obviously 1 in this case.

The program will automatically create the required registry object for you.