[ANSWERED] Dance X Kinect X DMX

[Lighting273]

Hello there, 

Josh Harriette here, primarily a dancer who is also a lighting designer... https://www.joshuaharriette.co...

my interaction with Isadora so far ... 

I am wishing to investigate and research controlling lights/ dmx through motion tracking of a kinect ... baby steps of course... 

As a starting point... I wishing to achieve something like this to spring board ideas... https://www.bbc.co.uk/programm...

Any advice, guides or tips on a setup of Kinect > DMX > Moving light ? 

Huge thanks and appreciation !! 

JX

[DusX]

@lighting273

Controlling lighting via DMX is much the same as controlling the 3D planes in your video. It looks to me like your in great shape to jump in and experiment. Since you have lighting design experience i don't need to point out that Isadora generally uses a range of 0-100 while DMX is 0-255 and requires some scaling.

Keep posting, it will be fun to see where you go with this :)

[Juriaan]

@lighting273

Hi there! 

Welcome to the Isadora community, glad to have you here. Beautifull work/process that you are showing!

Regarding your question;

Hardware

1. An Enttec USB DMX or ArtNet capable receiver would do the trick just fine! See also our support article regarding DMX and the necessary Isadora actors; https://support.troikatronix.c...
2. Daisy chain your moving heads, they have a DMX In / DMX Out. So you can easily extend the system by just plugging them in at the back. Be aware that you need to change the DMX address.
3. I would start with small moving heads. Just ask your local rental company or they have some heads that are lying around that you could rent for a cheaper price. They can be quite costly if you need multiple to experiment with.
4. At your end performance, I would personally use LED Moving heads. Mainly because you then also have a creative outlet in colour. Older moving heads are using a colour wheel, limiting your choice of colours to only 5-7 different ones. (They are a lot cheaper..)
5. Use a tiny bit of smoke in the space to make the beams visible

Software (Isadora)

1. Smoothing is everything here, the transitions and the speed of the movement make it clear for the audience member. The Smoothing actor in Izzy is great for this!
2. You will need a general actor that does all the calculations based on the space. Using a User Actor input for offset we can duplicate this User actor for all the 'X' moving heads/lights that you are going to use.
   1. The user actor should also do the transition between two values that are far apart from each other. That way you get nice and even movements.
3. Using a Background scene to host all our controllers for our Scenes, we can make smooth transitions! So we use a Background scene that has our User actors for all our moving heads, using Broadcasters / Listeners we send the values from the active scene to our background scene. Why you might ask? Because it can happen that if you go from scene to scene that the values are jumping. Causing an ugly transition in the light.
4. Using the Calc 2D / Calc 3D we can calculate the angle based on the position in space. If you need any help with this, feel free to get in touch/post on the forum.

Should be a fun project! If you need any assist let us know by posting on the forum :)

[Lighting273]

@juriaan I appreciate the response ! Seems 'simple' enough hahaha 

I have a Enttec USB Dmx arriving tomorrow, so I will start this week eek. Could you recommend any others actors that could be useful for me to use for the setup? 

I fairly comfortable with lighting with Etc Eos. I was wondering if it potentially better to try or possible to achieve the same with Enttec Dmx with sending OSC to ETC Eos nomad? 

[Lighting273]

@dusxt 

thanks for the encouragement :) 

[DusX]

@lighting273

You will probably want this User Actor to get you started with your new enttec interface: https://troikatronix.com/add-o...

[n.jones]

@dusx quick question, I’ve got a wireless artnet setup working with an entec Ethernet to dmx converter using an iPad using the lumiair app as a light desk .Could this actor work with this type of setup by substituting the iPad control for isadora? 
I've a feeling I’m over simplifying the process once again.