James Elliott

This tool hosts Afterglow, a free, open-source live-coding environment for creating light shows using any interface compatible with the Open Lighting Architecture, entirely inside Max. It allows Max patchers to control the lighting cues, including adjusting their parameters as each frame of lighting control information is generated, so you can do things like using audio analysis or vizzie to create effects on a huge lighting grid.

The tool page describes the Max objects that the package offers, and explains how to install the Open Lighting Architecture. The afterglow-max package includes Help patchers and Reference pages to help you get your bearings, but you will also want to explore Afterglow's own extensive documentation.

In addition to being designed to allow you to inject your own code right into the frame rendering process, there are other ways that Afterglow differs from other lighting control software you may have worked with. The early stages of its rendering loop can work with higher levels of abstraction than the typical DMX channel value or fixture function (although those are well supported too):

You can express your desired results in terms of an abstract color, including support for the hue-saturation-lightness model, which is great for algorithmic looks, and have it translated to whatever color channels (or color wheel) your fixture supports.

Groups of moving heads can be told to aim in particular directions by specifying parameterized vectors, or to aim at a particular point in space, and Afterglow figures out how to translate that into DMX control values given its understanding of the fixture and where, and at what angle, you hung it.

There are a variety of oscillators which can efficiently drive effect parameters.

You can also create complex effects, with parameters that can be tweaked by Max, or through a rich binding to an Ableton Push controller.

The timing of effects is pervasively influenced by a deep notion of musical time, with support for synchronization via MIDI clock or Pioneer Pro DJ Link beat grids.


afterglow-max-control-light-shows-max

afterglow-max - Control light shows from Max

David Butler

imp.dmx is a cross-platform collection of Max/MSP/Jitter abstractions for dealing with DMX data in various forms. It focuses around the use of jitter matrices to store data, which the objects then read and write to. The aim is to provide the bridge between your patch and whatever object or method you use to output DMX from Max. The abstractions use native Max objects only, excepting the Art-Net patches which use some custom java networking objects, included in the distribution package.

All abstractions have fullly-featured help patchers and a comprehensive manual is included, along with an example patch showing configurations for popular DMX hardware configurations.

imp.dmx.read reads a list of consecutive DMX values out from a matrix.

imp.dmx.write writes a list of consecutive DMX values into a matrix.

imp.dmx.get gets the values of specified channels from a matrix.

imp.dmx.put puts specified values into specified channels in a matrix.

imp.dmx.prefix prefixes channel addresses to a list of consecutive DMX values to create a prefixed list.

imp.dmx.defix creates a list of consecutive DMX values from multiple lists of channel/value pairs (prefixed lists).

imp.dmx.artnetin broadcasts an inputted list of consecutive DMX values over IP using the Art-Net protocol.

imp.dmx.artnetout receives Art-Net broadcast DMX and outputs it as a list of consecutive DMX values.

imp.dmx.8to16 converts a single 16-bit int into two 8-bit ints, the MSB and LSB.

imp.dmx.16to8 converts two 8-bit ints into a 16-bit int, using them as the MSB and LSB.

imp.dmx.rgbcmy converts RGB values to CMY or vice versa.

The roster of abstractions included in imp.dmx will increase in future versions. The following is a list of abstractions likely to be included in the next version:

imp.dmx.test – Quick, general purpose DMX testing functions.

imp.dmx.blackout – An easy switchable blackout function.

imp.dmx.midiin – Convert MIDI CC values to DMX channel values.

imp.dmx.midiout – Convert DMX channel values to MIDI CC values.

imp.dmx.oscin – Convert OSC information to DMX channel values.

imp.dmx.oscout – Convert DMX channel values to OSC information.

imp.dmx.map~ - Map a signal level to a DMX value.

imp.dmx.pixelmap – Map an RGBA jitter matrix to DMX values.

Everything included in this package is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. This means that you are free to share and adapt the package, however you must credit the original work to ‘David Butler / The Impersonal Stereo’, and distribute the resulting adaptation under the same or a similar license. You may not use this work for commercial purposes (any venture where the primary goal is profit) without permission. If you wish to do so, please contact me atdavid@theimpersonalstereo.com. For the full terms of the license, seehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.


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