Operator`s manual

6. Shapes and Pixel Mapper effects - Page 95
TitanUniversal_Man_v7-0_PE.doc 02 September 2013
6. Shapes and Pixel Mapper effects
The Shape Generator in the Pearl Expert (sometimes known as an
Effects Generator on other consoles) allows you to quickly create
exciting light shows using lots of movement and changes, with the
minimum of programming.
The Pixel Mapper is used to generate animated textures using the
colour or intensity of a group of fixtures (often LED battens,
starcloths or LED web type fixtures). When viewed at a distance the
effect becomes clearly visible.
A shape is simply an automatic sequence of values which can be
applied to any attribute of a fixture. A circle shape, for example,
applied to the pan and tilt attributes, would cause the fixture to move
its beam around in a circular pattern. You can set the centre point of
the circle, the size of the circle and the speed of the circle movement.
In addition to position shapes, there are a large number of other
shapes available in
the Pearl Expert. The shapes are defined for a
particular attribute such as colour, dimmer, focus and so on. Some
shapes will not work with some fixtures; focus shapes, for example,
can produce nice “focus pull” effects on fixtures which have DMX
focusing, but will do nothing on fixtures which don’t have focusing.
A further category of shapes is the Block Shape. This type of shape
blocks out other shapes, preventing them from running. For example,
if some fixtures are running a Circle shape, and then a playback is
fired which has a Block Pan/Tilt shape on some of the fixtures, those
fixtures will stop running the circle shape. This can be very useful to
modify playbacks at showtime when used with the playback priority
feature (see section
7.6.5 on page 142).
When you use a shape with more than one fixture, you can choose to
either apply the shape identically to all the fixtures, or offset them so
that the shape runs along the fixtures creating “wave” or “ballyhoo”
type effects. This is called the Phase of the shape.