Very Beginner User- Question

HelenDeneb

Hello All!

I am a graduate student in lighting design taking a projection design course and it's my first day in depth researching how to use Isadora (second time opening the program). Please pardon any miss-use of terminology.

I am faking projection interaction by having a projected image of a cactus, that blooms when a person taps the image. There are 7 blooms with each bloom containing seven stages of bloom. This is a total of seven scenes per creation of bloom, therefore 49 stages total.

I would like to have the flexibility to trigger blooms out of order, and I figured that out using the Keyboard Watcher actor (assigning each set of 7 bloom stages their own trigger key). However, I would like to have the last scene of each bloom able to linger when another bloom is triggered.

Say the blooms are A thru H. I trigger B first, and then when B is complete, I trigger A. I would like the last scene of B to remain when A is triggered, and then when H is triggered, I'd like to have the last scenes of each previous, A and B linger. The final image of course, triggering the last stage of each bloom (creating the cactus in full bloom).

Thoughts on how this might be possible. As a rule I hear the stages don't truly overlap, but I have read a bit about Activating Scene?

Any help will be of help! :)

Skulpture

I do fully understand your set up from your description. A screen shot may help; but I *THINK* you may need an activate scene actor.

dbini

@helendeneb

this sounds quite complicated to describe. personally, to get that effect i would use 7 different movie files, one for each bloom, mapped together over the default cactus image. then advance through each movie using 7 Envelope Generators, each with 7 segments - connected to the Position input of each Movie Player (Speed set to zero)

DusX

@helendeneb

since you want to be able to have the previous state remain.. (do you want all to remain as you move thru them?)
I would consider doing the whole cactus portion of the show in 1 isadora scene. That makes displaying them all together very easy.
I would build each Cactus bloom series as a User Actor, with trigger controls and Media IDs as inputs.
Once you have 1 working.. you can add copies of the user actor, change the Media IDs, and you have now multiple sequences that can be triggered how ever you like.
This isn't the most beginner thing to do.. but User Actors are one of the most power pieces of Isadora so learning them early is a great idea.
I don't know exactly how you want things to work, or what media you are using.. but I think its an achievable goal.

If you can supply details on how you plan to structure the media.. I would be happy to make a demo file with a User actor explaining the method I described.
@dbini 's idea of laying the blooms over the background cactus sounds very good. So in that case, the Cactus, would be placed out side any user actor, and the blooms would overlay with alpha channels.