BlenderDMX

Blender addon to design and render DMX lighting

Entertainment and architectural DMX lighting visualization and rendering tool designed to offer a free, easy, and fully packed solution for Lighting Designers.

Device definition is based on GDTF Specification, utilizing the Fixture library on GDTF Share.

BlenderDMX is built on strong foundation of Blender, which runs equally well on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh computers. Its interface uses OpenGL to provide a consistent experience.


Motivation

As Lighting Designers, we have always wanted a free DMX Visualizer capable of raytracing. The real-time results of commercial visualizers are cool for programming the dynamics, however there's usually no option to make it photorealistic.

BlenderDMX offers both possibilities: Eevee real time renderer offers the dynamics, while Cycles offers stunning photorealistic results.

Advanced Networking

  • External DMX signal from sACN or Art-Net can be used for controlling, and it can be recorded as keyframes into Blender or the signal can be used for a special #bdmx driver in Blender to control other Blender objects/properties.
  • OpenSoundControl can send fixture selection to external DMX consoles.
  • PosiStageNet can receive position information from different trackers connected to a PSN server, it's followers can be moving lights or any other Blender objects.
  • GDTF Share and format integration provides source of fixture data.
  • MVR-xchange protocol offers seamless MVR workflow.

Open Source

The source code is completely open source under the GPLv3 license and openly available on GitHub. Feel free to inspect, share, and contribute!

BlenderDMX is using General Device Type Format (GDTF) and My Virtual Rig (MVR) - open-source file formats that let you share anything with anyone.


The Project

BlenderDMX BlenderDMX allows using lighting fixture's definitions from GDTF and also loading of complete scenes from MVR. Fixture's manipulation can be done internally in Blender or externally via DMX like ArtNet or sACN. External DMX or internal Programmer state can be recorded into Blender's timeline via Keyframes recording. BlenderDMX also offers dedicated DMX driver for Blender to control any Blender property via external DMX signal.

Beautiful Renders

Blender can achieve very eye pleasing photorealistic renders thanks to it's raytracing rendering method called Cycles. The Cycles renderer as well as the OpenImageDenoise can run on GPU on supported hardware. Image by 21 Production. See more examples in the Gallery.

How to Get Started

Our Getting Started Guide walks you through the steps of downloading BlenderDMX.

Detailed usage documentation is available in the User Guide. Also head over to our Documentation & FAQ page for more information.

Recent Blog Posts

BlenderDMX 1.8.0 Released


Support for second gobo wheel, iris, continuous pan/tilt, CTC and more Second gobo, iris, continuous movement This release contains support for new attributes (Gobo2, Iris, CTC, CTO, CTB, PanRotate, TiltRotate) and more.

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BlenderDMX 1.7.5 Released


Allow using user writable directory associated with an extension (extension only) Show fixture name in Align panel if it is a selected active object Fix count of selected fixtures in Programmer, Align, and other panels Ensure that the beam has full diameter at the lense in Cycles for Blender 4.

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