Keyframe recording

BlenderDMX Addon allows recording keyframes from external DMX like ArtNet or sACN and also from the included Programmer.

Keyframe Recorder#

• Add Keyframe allows to manually insert keyframes related to the fixture attributes, like intensity, color, gobo, beam…
• Auto Keying turns on Blender internal auto-keying + changes to fixtures attributes (intensity, colors, gobo, beam…) are also recorded.
• Keyframe only selected fixtures (not for autokeying) allows to record keyframes only for selected fixtures.

Recording DMX#

To record external DMX, turn on Auto Keying, start DMX source and set the animation to the Play Animation state ⏯️

Delete keyframes#

• Delete from selected fixtures
• Delete from all fixtures

These buttons allow to quickly delete all keyframes from selected/all fixtures.

Recorded data#

Recorded data can be seen in the timeline, make sure to uncheck Only Show Selected. The Only Show Selected is only affecting visibility of the data, keyframing of selected/unselected (fixtures) is controlled by the BlenderDMX Keyframing settings.

The keyframed data no longer have any DMX information in them and thus cannot be converted back to DMX. For example: when you set (via DMX) intensity and color on RGB/CMY and/or on color wheel, and/or on CTO, Blender will typically record this as a keyframe with one info (rgb color) and there’s no way to deconstruct it back to what was RGB, what was color wheel and what was dimmer.

Recording #bdmx driver#

Object with #bdmx driver can be recorded to keyframes, but in order to play the animation, the #bdmx driver must be removed or disabled. As disabling it does not seem to be possible in Blender, BlenderDMX Addon adds extra options to the Keyframe recording panel.

This allows object with the driver to be either Recorded or Played back:

Controlling Blender controls via DMX#

When recording DMX, it is useful to be able to remotely control Blender’s Auto-keying and also the animation/timeline play state. There is a special BlenderControl fixture included in the BlenderDMX addon and available in GDTF Share. To control Blender’s controls, patch the BlenderControl fixture into BlenderDMX and into your DMX console. See DMX chart of the BlenderControl.

Playmode allows to set the state of the animation player:#

Recording allows to enable/disable the auto-keying:#

World background color#

The RGB and Dimmer allow to set (and also to be keyframed) the Worlds background.

Notes:#

BlenderDMX Addon provides a UI to set Background color in Setup. Blender itself also provides UI in the World panel. When changing background via DMX or via Programmer, the changes are synchronized to the UI, but when changing the background via any of the UI, changes are not synchronized to the DMX/Programmer.

The BlenderControl DMX channels have No Function at DMX 0, to allow to not affect Blender from DMX/Programmer at all.