Unreal DMX 4.26 Updates Part 1

all right here's the 426 update i'm going to try and go through this as quickly as possible just do some high level changes um that have happened and then maybe do some focus videos on more specific topics so let's get rolling the first thing that you'll want to do is go and enable the plugins so you search for dmx you'll notice now they're in beta no longer experimental however there was a big change between 25 and 26 so you will probably want to just start a new project because there's not a really good way to upgrade and it probably just caused more problems so i would start a brand new project enable all of them we have a new pixel mapping feature which i probably won't cover at all in this one but it is there so once you restart you will get this nifty little dmx icon but before we dive into that i just want to go over a couple settings in the project settings now we have a drop down for ips so you can pick which nick you have i'm just going to go with the primary you still have your offsets you have categories there's a new section for attributes which i'll talk about then there's also refresh and send rates and then these send and receive by default well actually what they'll do is in a standalone or in a build that will override what your what you've done here so that way if you accidentally have this paused and you go standalone it will override it which is usually what you want so but that's what those checkboxes do so now that we have this icon here the other thing we've decoupled the monitoring part so now you can actually look at a channel monitor without having it to be bound to an asset which is pretty nice other than that it works the same way there's a new window which is the activity monitor which any patch universe that you have it will show here you can cap it with ranges and things like this but i actually kind of like this one um it's because it gives me just a better overall picture of like what's going on uh and then there's some updates to the output console which are it's much nicer and easier to use but we're going to talk about input mostly today so same thing as before i have my magic cue kind of show already set up i have a sharpie strobe a fake cupix i think and some led par basically and i'll try and bring that over when i do something with it so we will right click go to dmx add a dmx library with dmx um example one and open it up and it's a fairly familiar looking window but when you're in controllers you'll add a new controller you'll notice you may get this little warning which is pretty handy it's telling you that you already have some libraries that have these same addresses um and they're still not really a clear i guess way of merging or doing things with different libraries that overlap so it's just a little nice handy thing to let you know hey you might want to check that out so i'm actually just going to use a couple of universes i use artnet because it just seems to work really simply in broadcast and that's good to go on these settings you can change it to unicast now and add ips and things like this but i just leave it broadcast easy enough we go to the picture type window we're going to add a new type we're going to go with our beami light again this time and i'm going to go just do the same thing i did before with importing so when i go now and pick my gtf file you have to already have these in your project right like i had already brought them in um they're in here right here they don't ship with the engine uh you have to get them from gtf.share.com and i'm going to use this clay packing sharpie and notice like it kind of auto populates and that's a good thing that's what we want to have happen i'm going to change the category just make it a moving head and you'll see you get your two modes so i got standard vector i'm going standard in this case and you'll see now that we have two columns here we have functions and attributes now attributes are what we're going to use internally inside the engine for anything that we're doing so if you're doing blueprint work you no longer have to use like fines and things like this for functions like you have a defined set of attributes and these attributes are specified in this project settings we give you this default set and basically you have a name and then you have a keyword so the keywords are just to kind of try and help auto populate this stuff if you're importing so basically anything that in there just separated with commas and spaces so if i can put another one in here and just say i wanted you know color as well in case it was actually a name color right and so then if it you import if you're using this dmx import it will automatically match for you which is pretty handy and in this case i'm actually going to use it sharpies don't have zoom but i want to show off what zoom does so i'm going to remap focus so if i move focus on my camsys it will now adjust zoom internally and you saw the same function properties down here that you did before so you can pick whether it's 8 or 16 bit or whatever it is you can change the significant and there is a default value which i think currently doesn't work but it will work the next thing we'll do is just i'll create a couple more different types just to get going so i'll do an rgb plus uh dimmer or i guess whatever we'll call this led par right and i'm not going to do a import this time as a static fixture it's fine and then my mode i'll actually name it rgb dimmer and this time i'm just going to create it from scratch right so really the only poor portion of this that matters for me for internally is this attribute section however just for the sake of clarity i'm going to go ahead and type these in just because it looks nicer but internally everything's going to be using attributes these functions are really just mostly for importing and for remapping things like that so we're good we got this we're good to go there uh we had what did i have i also had a strobe and a cubix panel so this is brand new um you know i'm gonna again i just picked the cupix kind of at random here but we have the ability to kind of deal with matrix fixtures and cells now so even if you were to change this to matrix it this is just categorically you actually have to tell it hey this is a matrix here with this checkbox and when you do this now when i go into mode um i get a slightly different window setup than if i'm not in a matrix section right so here i'm going to name this one just rgb which is all that they are and then i kind of get this option for what i want the first cell to be how many cells is it so in this case it's a 5x5 what's the sorting order so start you know all the possible combinations there then i'm going to specify what my cell attributes are here so in this case i'm going to tell it that these are red green and blue right so we're going to red green and blue and right now importing doesn't do matrixes on its own so that's why there's no functions in this case here and so then you'll see over here i have 75 channels of red green blue now if for instance this particular fixture had a master dimmer i can add that i can say okay this is a dimmer channel and right now it's telling me hey you have a problem that's because i told this the first cell is one and this thinks this is one so one of two things have to happen either i have to move this one right so i need to put this on channel 76 or something like that or uh alternatively i could move this one to start a channel two right so it depends on whether these master functions are in the front or in the back in this case um for this fixture there aren't any um but if you were trying to create something like a magic panel and you need a pen tilt this is how you would do that you would add the functions into the front of where all the cells are because that's how they are let me see how we are on time okay good so we have these three examples and we'll throw them in the scene and um see how they work but before that we go into the patch right and we're actually going to patch these things so i know that i have in mind i have two of these uh beamy lights so again same kind of thing i'll i'll name it and so that way if i duplicate it it will just increment properly now we have this nice little visual over here and you can move these around when you when you do that of course it disables auto assign but you are free to do this you can change the colors that's actually pretty nice um and um i don't think you can multi-select yet but really really cool that this is a nice little visual reference here for you um i have just double checked my patch screen um i had a strobe at 33 okay so i didn't pick a strobe on this one and then i had my cubic panel so i'll put this guy in here and and i'll just remember it i only have one so it doesn't really matter and then i'll take off auto assign and i put this one at 101 just to like a nice big i could have just drug it around if i want and then i also have um 10 of these led parts patched and i put them in universe 2. so one thing to note if you swap universes like it doesn't necessarily know like hey should i restack this or not so if you toggle it off and talk about it on it will restack it for you it basically then does a search thing so i can do just again i can if i name this one and duplicate it i can get my ton of them really quickly i can grab these and duplicate them again in here if i want to and it will kind of keep going um so it just kind of depends on what what we have but this is all i have for right now so let's so we got our patch everything's good and let's go back to the level so now inside the level uh if you have engine and plug-in content on you can see i already have data coming in right from my magic queue so that's why there's stuff in here in the monitor uh you'll have this dmx content fixtures content and inside here you'll see there's all kinds of neat things that we've given you now there's water fountains there's lasers there's fireworks pyro there's some stage elements with some truss and barricades and some drape and stuff and hopefully we'll keep adding to these but we're going to deal with the light fixtures for now so all the light fixtures now uh have it there's a dmx actor class okay so if i open this guy up you'll see now inside of it there's not much here there used to be all these blueprints and stuff but now it's pretty basic it's just going to get the patch get the attributes initialized set up our interpolation step and then on when the patch is received when data is received for this fixture only so there's no more protocol receipt or i think it's there but we don't use it we're going to get the values and push them in so if you needed to make any modifications like this is the place you would probably want to do it like for instance if you wanted to change color from rgb to cmy you do your math in here before it pushes the data but this is kind of it so when you create a blank dmx actor now so i'll just go in here and if i create a blueprint i do dmx yeah this fixture actor [Music] right you'll notice that the the structure is there for you uh the only difference is in ours we've added the meshes and all the components that we want but you could just as easily build your own this way i'd probably recommend at least in the beginning just use this one and make make alterations to it however an important thing to kind of think about is if you edit the things that are in here these are in your engine content so they will have you'll edit it essentially for any project that's referencing it so a good way to work with these is to actually create a child blueprint so now i have basically an inherited copy and i'm going to move that to where i want it to be and now i'm going to use these because now if i make any changes to these values it's not going to affect the base class and so what i would recommend is for every type of light you are going to create so in this case really what i'm doing is i'm using i'm doing it this would be my beamy light you know if i had um you know whatever bmf l's and and then i had vipers and i had other things i would have one of these child classes per type of light that i have so that way i can change the settings for it for that group of fixtures so i put this in the scene you'll see now that we have some settings on it the patch is actually on the base level now you don't you no longer have to actually go into the component it's on the base level so this really helps with just visibility let me minimize that a little bit so we get a little more space and so we also have these settings for quality level so it's a new beam shader that's actually a ray march technique and so you can adjust the amount of samples so this is really really useful for again if you have fixtures that are far away you don't want to eat in your performance you can dial it down or if you're trying to record into dmx into unreal which is a whole other topic you could crank the quality down on record and then if you're rendering out crank the quality up to ultra so i'm just going to go on ultra because it looks better this is the max intensity of the light in approximately in lumens the distance is the attenuation distance color and then the spot and intensity spot and point intensities to kind of try to help you try and balance between how much light should it cast versus how much of the beam should we actually see so for instance like a wash light would actually throw more light on the ground but you wouldn't see like a defined like beam cone but like a sharpie or something like that would be kind of the opposite so you these are to kind of help you tweak those and you can determine if you want to cast shadows or use occlusion the um so i can pick the library here um no problem so i can just say here's my example and i can pick my bme1 and that's totally fine there's nothing wrong with that at that point i'm pretty much done so if i pop into simulate and i'll get my console here and right alright go full and like there we go so i basically i've at least got you know the thing going on so i think it does look a little funny and part of the reason for that i think is a i have a post-process volume that i've been messing around with and um it's affecting some of the uh some of the things on it but in any case that is basically all that i need to do to get to get this thing you know working at least initially so uh inside each of these components i'll just go over this really quickly there's some settings for them and again like if you edit any um you can edit them individually on the fixture level or you can again since we use a child blueprint class we could just edit it on the child right so any that way any light that's using the same blueprint will be affected by these things but i guess the they all have you know they have what they are so there's nothing necessarily special about this dimmer component it's just we've told it hey we're listening to dim you know the the logic is there for the dimmer to work but we could tell it to listen to a different channel i guess so you have your min and max what's the default value you know is it you can just disable components you can tell if it's using matrix data and then you can uh just the skip threshold is for and interp is to try and help with uh dmx interpolation so again i'll um i'll throw it into playing over here or simulate in this case um go into full that's fine and not have it selected and you know again now we can since i remapped it i've got this i've got this nice beautiful looking beam and you know it's just a really really solid looking uh feature right now honestly and so this is uh you know again the basic basic basics now you also have a lens material so you can uh play with that as well some very very other very cool things that we'll we'll definitely like to hopefully get into in future videos but so that's the basic for that guy um we're all you know where i'm happy you know it does what i what i think um it should do and you know that's great so the next uh thing we'll look at is the other fixture types that we added so super simple again um for the static head it's again it's the same kind of thing but there's no pan tilt components on it right the reason it actually has a zoom strobe and a dimmer like i'm not using all those so here's again what i would recommend i will delete this guy on the level i'm going to create a child blueprint class and move it into my actual project right and then i'll rename this guy so i'm going to say this is my led par all right and so now i'm going to make some edits to this and like because 50 000 is incredibly bright for something like this right so let's go with like maybe like ten thousand right and it's distance it's definitely not going to throw does that say ten thousand yeah it's definitely not going to throw as far so let's go with maybe like five uh 500 sure and temp's fine we'll leave all this stuff the same so the other thing i'm going to um look at it's like i'm not using a strobe right so i can turn it off just one more thing i don't need right now the zoom i think i'm gonna leave it enabled because um i need i want this default value to change so i you know right now it's gonna be a really narrow beam i'm gonna widen that out and say it's got a 60 degree type lens on it and we i think i'll leave everything else alone so you'll see there's a fourth channel here we don't use it because we don't have the ability to you know lights don't give us a color chart so we don't know how much amber or white we would need to mix a color if you have a light that has a calibrated mode just use that and if you find a light that has a chart you could enable it and make it work but that's why there's just not one there right now so i can drag that into level and this is great and so since i had uh 10 of these i'm just going to make a few copies so i have those five and we'll go like that so great now i have those 10 of them um i sh i i already released this somewhere but uh uh i may write this custom tool to help with patching i'll try put it somewhere where i have a link it's actually in the geodesic github but i had to make some changes to update for 426 but so just to help me patch this a little bit quicker i will go to my example one i'll go to my first one and i'm going to address and rename them and there we go so now we're good to go so all that does really is it's just like a recursive lookup that goes through and goes and increments them in order and then renames them based on what they were in the patch so we'll definitely push this out somewhere because it's super handy and so then we're good on on these guys so again if i hit play or simulate in this case i'll grab the um these things and put them in full and make some red and now since those were led and they're using the color component you know we can use the color mixing and we get this nice kind of thing going here and then i can also do my intensity since they have a dimmer channel so super cool so that's good and the last but not least of course is this idea the new one the matrix fixture so go back to this i'm going to do the same thing i did before create child blueprint class i'll just rename it first i'm going to call this qpx uh and then i'm gonna move that out of here and throw it and shoot throw it in the demo folder yeah all right so now i have this cupix one so this one is slightly different so when i drop it in you'll notice there's nothing there and the the matrix fixture the way it's designed from us it's actually procedural so it will generate the number of cells based on the patch so it's important that your patch is accurate as far as like how many cells are in it and what they do so again it still has the same base components but we also gave the ability to pan or tilt the individual cells so for something like a shower bar or rogues or whatever uh there's various ones that do it and then you have again you can add different components to the matrix portions of it so the way that actually works is first you want to tell it what it is so i'm going to just tell it that you are a my cupix and then you'll specify the outer dimensions so 50 and 50 and how deep is the unit and i generate preview mesh and it's going to generate the mesh for me um and what's cool about this too is again probably another video but if i actually open this up there is a place where you can change the lens too so you're not bound to our square lens you can make it circle or whatever you want you can put a little smiley face in there it doesn't really matter and so that's pretty much it again you have the same kind of controls for it and so i will and right now there's something where they don't really go out all the way it's something to do with like the what we're using for like the flare effect of it um but if we grab the qpx sorry full there we go very very cool um if i grab it and somebody wants to help me be a better magic queue programmer um hit me up and there we go so now we have the same kind of thing uh with the um uh you know matrix where we can do the chase internally inside of it so pretty pretty cool stuff and you'll notice it's kind of hard to see but it's actually doing like a little uh a little something on the ground here as well it's doing like a um kind of an averaging so you're not going to notice like a ton of movement from something like this but you will notice the difference between say if you have you know um them all at full you know and versus you know um and i can see like you know doing something with the color chase in it so it's uh yeah that's kind of the basics for those things uh there's a couple of other types in there um but i think this zone is way longer than the other one so we're gonna cut it off there and then maybe we'll do another one that has pixel mapping uh dmx recording um how to edit the fixtures there's a whole slew of other topics that we'd love to get to but hopefully this will get you started for now um and then definitely come back to the um the mega thread that we started in uh the forum and let us know kind of what's going on what you're what you're seeing and um what you guys think all right see ya

Channel: Pixel Does...

Views: 10,657

Keywords:

Id: x7cGkjwcaeA

Length: 26min 36sec (1596 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020