HLS - You can create your own custom effect and place it on the PixelPlane

[JHinkle]

HLS provides you with a plane of pixel so you can present just about anything.

HLS allows you to place any HLS primitave effect on the Plane.

You can Place and modify a Nutcracker effect on the Plane.

This post will show you how to create your own effects an place them on the Plane.

HLS PixelPlane file import accepts a TEXT file. Doesn't need a TXT file extension - just make sure there are no formatting codes contained within.

Each line in the file represents a PIXEL. Each number with that line represents the RGB value of that pixel for a given time tic. RGB values a delimited by a space.

Example:

0 0 255 0 0 255
255 0 0 0 0 0
0 255 255 255 0 0 0

This simple example has 3 pixels and the effect is for 6 time slots. At a 50 msec resolution - that's a quater of a sec of pixel activity

A word about RGB values.

You need to make sure to generate the RGB values properly.

Vixen, which uses dot NET generates RGB backwards from what native mode Micrsoft C++ generates them.

Sean (Nutcracker) generates then the same as Vixen.

Don't worry - I correct then for native mode processing.

If you use native mode software - you will need to convert them as shown below.

RGB is a 24 bit number with red being 8 bits or 1 byte, green being 1 byte and blue being 1 byte.

The 3 color bytes are packed together as follows

Red is in bits 24 - 17
Green is in 16 - 9
Blue is in 8 to 1

If you want to have a Pixel Plane that consists of just 1 or 2 strings - try making you own effect file.

Remember - after you load it into HLS - you can change the timing to make it run half, third, or quater speed.

Enjoy.

Joe Hinkle

[JHinkle]

I forgot to tell you how to get your RGB number if you are doing it by hand.

All Intensity is from 0 to 255.

RED = Intensity * 65536

Green = Intensity * 256

BLUE = Intensity;

Add those three resulting numbers and you get the RGB value.

Example ---

RED - full intensity = 65536 * 255 = 16711680 --- in HEX its FF0000

GREEN - full intensity = 256 * 255 = 65280 ---- in HEX its 00FF00

BLUE - full intensity = 255 ---- in HEX its 0000FF

WHITE is full intensity of all three = 255 + 65280 + 16711680 = 16777215 --- in HEX its FFFFFF

Mix the three to get any intensity and color you like.

Joe

[injury]

Bumping this up since you mentioned it in a video and it took forever for me to find. Probably not bad subject matter for a sticky or a doc on the download site.

[jess_her]

Haven't braved building a pixel plane effect yet. The question I have is when I build a Nutcracker effect and I edit it in a HLS program I created just for this (RGB plane), can I save it back to a pixel plane effect from a RGB effect for my real show?? Do I save the text file to Nutcracker or the Libary or a new file?

Jess

[angus40]

You always save rgb -customized effects that you create as pixel plane effects .

Nutcracker effects is a totally seperate entity from hls's pixel plane effects.

[angus40]

Pixel Plane no no 's .

Do not rename any of your pixelplane or nutcracker effects if they are already placed in your sequence .