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blender-artnet

Blender script to push ArtNet data to Evee lights. Runs at 30fps with Evee rendering in the viewport.

Combine with QLCPlus to have a fully open source lighting system

Install

In the Code... menu download this repo as a zip file and remember the folder where you put it

  1. Install Blender 2.8 or higher.
  2. Edit | Preferences menu opens the preferences dialog
  3. Select the Add-ons tab
  4. Press the Install... button
  5. Select the zip file you downloaded
  6. Press the Install Addon button
  7. Close the preferences dialog
  8. ...
  9. Profit!

Usage

Turn on Viewport Shading and Evee rendering

Select a light in your scene and enable ArtNet Light Control in the properties. Assign a universe, base address and fixture type

Add your own named fixture types in src/fixture_type_store.py

In the Window menu, the Listen to ArtNet checkbox enables or disables Artnet input to Blender. It's on by default.

Keyframes

From version 1.6.2 this addon integrates with Blender Auto Keyframing. When this is enabled, the addon will append keyframes to the timeline for all properties modified via Artnet.

Editing in Blender

DMX Support

Handles the following DMX channels (coarse only for now)

Pan, Tilt and fixture modelling

If fixtures are visible in the scene, you may wish to model the body of the fixture. Typically it would have a panning section, containing a tilting section with the lamp in it. If you parent the objects in this chain, you can select the parent or grandparent to be animated with pan and tilt.

To use this method, select the light in Blender and select the Pan Target and Tilt Target. Select which axis of the light, its parent, or its grandparent to affect. You can also choose Ignore, for example if the fixture has panning but no tilt motor.

Pan and tilt affect the rotation transform, so you can use the delta rotation transform to set the centre position of your fixture models.

Future ideas

Focus can be handled by changing the spot size in Blender

Frost can be handled by changing the spot blend radius in Blender

Gobos can be handled by [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af-yLsRpF7I]

Versions

Version 1.6.3:

Version 1.6.2:

Version 1.6.1:

Version 1.6:

Version 1.5:

Version 1.3:

Version 1.2:

Contributions wanted

Please submit a PR if you have an improvement.

Funding

I'm not a professional lighting designer - this came out of a hobby project to control lighting for an event I worked on for a friend. So I have no personal value gained by working on improving it (unlike other open source software I work on), although it is rather fun. If lighting professionals see a value in this plugin I would be happy to be funded to work on it.

Alternatively, I would be very happy to accept high quality PRs to improve the plugin.

Many thanks to the below companies and individuals who have funded me to work on this addon.