Lara's Research Updates

DMX decoder has finally arrived! I've taken a look at the pieces I have in hand to figure out how to connect everything together. First of all, the LED strip lights... The end of the strip light has 4 small pins to connect into an outlet (the white cable that came with the light strips). However, these small pins are too small and too close to each other to be plugged in to the decoder. Instead, professor Nick suggested that I cut a length of the light strip at the conductive points and solder a wire between the light and the decoder. I'm planning to try my hand at soldering later this week. Here's a look at the decoder itself... There are 3 main outlets on the decoder: DMX, ethernet, LED channels. I will be connecting Gateway to Decoder's DMX In. For now, DMX Out will not be used. I'm not sure what to use the ethernet ports for... Maybe in a different setup, they could also work for DMX data??? For the LED strip, there are different input and output outlets. Input ...

Since I'm not entirely certain how much I will be able to achieve with CRMX in the upcoming weeks, I decided to also focus a bit on using LED strip lights with DMX. I already own 2 strips of LED lights that I bought for fun. What I need is a decoder that'll send DMX info to the light strip. I've found a few different options online. Some of them have the ability to connect multiple light strips or control multiple DMX universes. For testing purposes, I purchased the most basic and cheapest option on Amazon. --- After talking to Professor Nick about CRMX and the hardware limitations we have in the studio, we did a bit more research. In a few online tutorials, we came across individual wireless DMX transmitters. While I didn't have any plans to purchase extra equipment, Nick mentioned he could get one for the studio and I could test it for this class! When we have this transmitter at hand, the idea is that we will be able to use it as a CRMX transmitter instead of an MC P...

Alright! So, the past week has been a lot of testing (and failing). But I think I finally fully understand the capabilities of CRMX and what I can achieve with the hardware we have at hand in the studio. To start us off, as I found out in my previous post, there are 3 main components to a CRMX setup: Controller, Transmitter, and Receiver (Light). Online sources I've found thus far only mention the capability of Aputure lights to become transmitters. In this case, there would be a controller -> via CRMX (wireless), the controller would send info to the MC Pro Transmitter -> via DMX (cable), the transmitter would send the info to a light. What I want to achieve, however, is a little different. As a controller, I want to use Unreal Engine -> via DMX (cable), Unreal would send info to MC Pro Transmitter -> via CRMX (wireless), the transmitter would communicate with the rest of the lights and send info. The way I want to set up my system relies on (kind of) opposite connecti...

For the past week, I've been trying to figure out how to get the Aputure lights to communicate with each other wirelessly. This process was a little more complicated than I had imagined and I was surprised by the lack of information on manuals and tutorials. I don't think there's any information online about connecting Aputure lights to Unreal Engine specifically. Eventually, however, I've come across something called "CRMX". Turns out CRMX is the wireless new version of DMX and it stands for "Cognitive Radio MultipleXer". And surprise, surprise... the Aputure lights have this future implemented natively. However, once again, the manual information on CRMX is as limited as I had feared. Yeap... this is all the manual has to say about CRMX. At this point, I wasn't sure how to actually use CRMX with these lights. So I started looking up any and all tutorials I could find online. This video , though it wasn't specific to Aputure Lights, was help...

Since last week I have been thinking of what could be used for my final project for the class. I would like to go with the idea of setting up a virtual production set with my added light fixtures and Unreal commands. After a brief talk with Professor Nick, he mentioned that his current Independent Study class was interested in setting up the X-Wing in studio for virtual production. Since I already help out with this class as a TA, I thought I can jump on board to use this opportunity to set up my final DIGM540 project. Here are the final steps I have in mind for this project in order of importance: Figure out wireless connections between Aputure lights and program them to imitate moving lighting in the virtual scene Integrate LED strip lights to the scene and set them up with DMX Add on speech recognition and run lighting commands through speech AI Ideally, my schedule for the upcoming weeks would look like: Week 8: Aputure lights Week 9: LED strip lights Week 10: Voice commands Finals...

I found some new toys to play with and test DMX! These are Aputure Lights that were added to the studio a few months ago. So far, I don't think anyone has used these lights for anything other than a constant RGB color. However, they have DMX capabilities! And the case includes a USB-C to 5-pin DMX converter! So of course, I had to try them out... I started off by connecting one of the lights to the second port of Net3 Gateway. The first port is still occupied by the ADJ light since I want to try and use 2 different fixtures at the same time. Next, I worked on adding the new light fixture to my Unreal project. Working in the same DMX Library, I created a new fixture. It mostly had the same settings as the ADJ fixture, except I added only 3 attributes: Red, Green, and Blue. The intensity attribute might also be a feature in Aputure lights, but I need to read the manual further to see what other attributes are available. To figure out the DMX address and starting channel of the new li...

Here is one of the ideas that got stuck with me since the first week of class: taking the light information from a camera or a specific point in space in Unreal and doing some calculations to send the average color into a DMX light in the studio. While looking for information or ideas on how to achieve this, I've come across an Unreal feature called Pixel Mapping. And yes... this feature was exactly what I had been thinking of creating all this time, so turns out I don't have to reinvent the wheel! Here is the Unreal Pixel Mapping documentation with more detailed information. Since this feature didn't seem too complicated to set up, I wanted to give it a try and see how customizable it can be. This process simply has 3 main actors... 2D Scene Capture Camera: This camera is how the artist can decide which area in the scene will be captured in view and used for color averaging. Render Target: This actor takes the output from the camera and turns it into a texture. Pixel Mapp...

An idea that struck me out of nowhere this week was the ability to control DMX lights through voice commands. I'm thinking that in a one-woman show in a studio, different lighting pre-sets could be created in advance. And during the show, Unreal could be listening for voice commands and switch programs based on the words/phrases. I don't think Unreal Engine has an inherent voice recognition program. However, I found this free plugin in the Unreal Store and it somewhat looks promising. Apart from Unreal's store, I've found that some people had success using Meta's voice recognition in the engine. I'm not yet sure which plugin they used or how they set it up, but I think it's a promising option to follow if the Runtime Speech Recognizer plugin doesn't work. I'm planning to also reach out to another student in Drexel who has experience with Meta's voice recognition and get some feedback for my project!

One of the earlier ideas I had this quarter was to create a studio lighting setup controlled from a virtual environment, but make it indie. Most of the equipment I've used to far have already existed in the studio, but they may not be the most cost effective options for a smaller studio or an independent creator. ADJ Mega Par Profile Plus These are the light fixtures we've been using in the studio for some time now. I've been testing DMX in Unreal with two extra fixtures we have laying around in the cabinet. However, this exact model lights are $115 each and it may not be feasible for an independent creator who would need multiple lights for a scene. There are of course cheaper options for par lights from different brands. But I can't say anything on its quality or how long it'll last. Aputure MC Pro These are the new lights we have in the studio and to be honest, they're pretty damn cool. However, a kit with 8 lights costs a whooping $1900! While these lights a...

Though I dived into Unreal DMX setup without confirming if my lights were properly connected, I eventually figured out how to get them to work through the engine! My main sources were the Unreal documentation and this specific  tutorial on Youtube. There are many tutorials that show cool DMX stuff that can be done in Unreal, but I've realized that only a limited few actually show how to pipe in the equipment into Unreal Engine or set up the network connections. Here are the steps I followed to get the lighting to work with Unreal: Creating a project and enabling plug-ins. I chose to create a DMX template project, which already came with all necessary plugins enabled. Changing project settings. I created a new "Output Port" and adjusted the settings based on the hardware and network I used. (The first 3 ports are the pre-existing ones from the project template.) - Net3 Gateway uses sACN protocol instead of Art-Net. - "Network Interface IP Address" is the main ...