Work in progress - Onge

This tutorial is the first part in a series I am proposing to do on the Fixture Creator in FreeStyler. I intend to do a tutorial for each type of profile available when you first start the Fixture Creator. They will be “Parcan, dimmer,…”, “Fogger-Hazer”, Scan/Movinghd.“ and “Other”. This tutorial is for a Moving Head.

Hopefully this tutorial will enable new users of the FreeStyler Fixture Creator to gain enough information to be able to create their own fixtures and maybe give some other users some extra information on the Fixture Creator. I am not claiming this is the best way or the easiest way to create fixtures but it works for the purpose of this tutorial.

I would like to suggest to new users of lighting control software that they do their homework on how DMX and lighting fixtures work, this will make understanding this tutorial much easier.

The fixture I am going to create is a Showtec Explorer 250 Pro MKII, it is a moving head, I am going to use in 16 channel mode as that is the only mode the manual shows you about.

To get the manual and other information on this lighting fixture the please visit Showtec Explorer 250 Pro MKII Info
The pdf manual for this fixture has been uploaded to this site can be found hereShowtec Explorer 250 Pro MK 11 - Manual

The reason I have chosen this fixture is because it has an extensive range of features which hopefully will show the most of what the Fixture Creator can and cannot do.

Problems with using this fixture as an example is I do not have one, so it is untested and the manual does not show what the actual gobos are, so I have used numbers for them instead.

TODO: The Macro tab. I will add this as soon as I can, I just wanted to get this main part done and onto the FreeStyler Support Forum as soon as possible. Resize the .gif image of the fixture so it fits better into the Fixture Creator.

I would appreciate any comments good or bad, if they are bad then make sure it is constructive so I can make the required changes to improve it.

I did start to do a video tutorial but I ended up needing to talk far to much to explain things so was not really practical as the file size was getting huge.

This tutorial is also available in a pdf format. Fixture Creator Tutorial - Moving Head

Start the Fixture Creator program, there should be an icon on your desktop if you did a standard install of FreeStyler.
You should be presented with a screen similar to the one below.

As we are going to create a fixture for the Showtec Explorer 250 Pro MKII moving head go ahead and press the “Scan / Movinghd.” button on the “Create new profile” dialogue that is showing in the middle of the Fixture Creator.

So hopefully you have obtained a copy of the manual and have located the DMX Protocol within it. As you can see it has 16 channels and covers nearly all the features on the “Fixture config.” tab of the Fixture Creator as shown in the above image.

Right now we begin to fill in the values on this screen, the “Fixture config.” tab. Start with the “Manufacturer” as we know this is a Showtec fixture we put in “Showtec” as seen in the picture below.

Please ensure you spell the Manufacturer correctly as this is used to organise the fixtures into manufacturers within FreeStyler. Now for the “Fixture name” so enter the data as below.

Each fixture name needs to be unique and you will discover this if you try to save a fixture with the same name.

Above is the image of the Showtec Explorer 250 PRO MK11. This needs to be copied to the FreeStyler/Fixtures folder so you can then select it in the next part of this tutorial.

Click into the “Fixt. picture” input box and then the picture is chosen from the list on the right hand side of the Fixture Creator. The name is pulled into the input box and the picture of the fixture is displayed to the right of the name. As mentioned I need to adjust the size of the picture, currently it is at 100×100 an ideal size would be 60×60. The grey input box to the right of the fixture picture is a comment box. Normally I put information such as fixture name, fixture version, mode, number of channels, fixture file version, created by, date created and tested or not. I am not going to bother with that in this tutorial. As I have mentioned it is a 16 channel fixture so we need to put 16 in the “Total channels” input box, as shown below.

Looking at the manual we see that it shows the first 4 channels as defined for pan and tilt. Well actually we have two channels for Pan and two channels for Tilt. This is called 16bit movement, the reason for this is each DMX channel can only have 256 values from 0 – 255. This fixture can pan 580° which means 580 ÷ 256 = 2.265. That is 2.265 degrees for every value on one DMX channel, it does not sound a lot but when you see it in action you will be surprised how big the jump is between each value, now using the other channel associated with Pan on this fixture we can have 256 values for every value on the first Pan channel. This is why most of the time the other channel is called “Fine”. The same principle applies to the Tilt channel as well.
Please note not all fixtures have 16bit movement channels.
Now that has been explained a bit we can enter the values for the Pan and Tilt channels as shown in the picture below.

You would normally put the degree values of the Pan and Tilt of the fixture into the Pan/Tilt Range input boxes, I have left them empty.

In the manual it states that the “lamp channel” is 6. The “on” value is between 128 & 139 and the “off” value is between 230 & 239 so I have chosen values of 130 & 235 respectively. I always use mid values to ensure a “safety margin” to get the function required.

The “Intensity channel”, otherwise known as the “dimmer” channel is on channel 16 and its values go from 0 to 255. Enter them as shown above.
Some fixtures have the dimmer channel shared with the strobe channel or some other feature, you would still put the range of the dimmer in these input boxes as it is defined in the manual.

This fixture uses the same channel for the shutter and strobing, which is quite common to a lot of fixtures as it is the mechanical shutter that opens and closes causes the strobing effect. Anyway enter the “Shutter ch.” values and “Strobe ch.” values as shown above and below.

Did you notice that you could not enter a value in the “off” value for the “Strobe ch.” That is because the Fixture Creator knows that the strobe channel is shared with the shutter channel.

While looking at the manual and this part of the Fixture Creator I noticed that the manual mentioned that the “Reset” was on the same channel/value as the “Lamp On” so I have added that here as well. As I do not have the real fixture to test this I am assuming that doing a lamp on and a reset will do the same thing.

In the above picture I have entered the channel numbers for the Prism and Prism rotation as well as the Focus channel. These will give you sliders you can control them with in FreeStyler (not the ones on the right of the screen).

Here I have told the Fixture Creator that it has its colour channel on 7 and that we have 18 colours. If you look at the manual you might be a bit confused by this as it only mentions 8 colours and a rainbow effect. Well what I have done here is allowed for split colours and 3 rotation speeds for the rainbow effect. Not all fixtures allow for split colours as their colour wheels are indexed, what that means is if you select any of the values allowed for that colour it will always show the whole colour. This colour wheel is not indexed so selecting values near the beginning or the end of its range will allow the previous or next colour to appear as well. Check your manual or do a simple test of moving the slider from value to value and see what happens on the real fixture.

Right now onto the gobo wheels, this fixture has 2 gobo wheels and one of them has rotating gobos. The first gobo wheel is the static gobo wheel, static in the sense that the gobos do not rotate but obviously the wheel that the gobos are on does, otherwise you would not be able to select the gobos. So that uses channel 8 and has 7 gobos on it.
The second gobo wheel is on channel 11 has 9 gobos and the gobo rotation channel is 12 as can be seen in the above picture.

The above image shows the finished definition of the “Fixture config.” tab. Some of you might have noticed that 2 channels have not been defined and these are channels 5 and 13. I will not define channel 5 as it is used for Pan/Tilt speed in Vector mode and as the manual does not say how to get it into Vector mode and you will most probably never use it in Vector mode because you will be controlling the speed the fixture moves at within FreeStyler using fade times. Channel 13 is not being defined here as it has a multitude of functions. I could define it on a gobo channel, but that might be a bit confusing to start with, so I will define using the “Macro” tab in a later part of this tutorial.