Pan/Tilt Degree option

It would be nice if you could additionally to DMX and Unit Values, also set degree Values for Pan/Tilt Fixtures.
The Advantage would be that you can create Global Presets with lets say 45° Pan and apply it to different fixture types, regardless of there Maximum Pan Range.

The Math behind it is rather simple:
(MaxDMXValue / 2) + ((MaxDMXValue / 2) / MaxPanRange * X°) = DesiredDMXValue

For a Pan in the other direction you just have to change the degree to a nagitive Value and it still works.

Would be nice to see that Feature

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Yes, and doing an offset when everything is hung sideways would be much nicer. Just put in 90 degrees and its done

+1 would love to see this.

It is a great idea however it is much more involved than you would imagine. This would require the fixture profile itself to understand the relationship between the DMX value and the physical degrees. This would have to be done for each individual fixture profile which currently does not exist in the fixture editor. We do have plans for a complete rebuild of the fixture editor so I can put that on the list for that rebuild. It will be a big job and there is no timetable for that right now though.

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Yes that would be the best way and a lot of work.

You could also make it a patch transform.
The user should specify the degrees for a fixture in the patch him self what would be cumbersome but you would not need to change/add to every fixture ever made for vista and makes the feature available faster.

+1 for degrees

Not knowing how it works to the same extent you do I may be well off here, however it seems like all the information to do this is already there. The fixture profile involves knowing the max pan and tilt degrees of a fixture, it seems quite a simple sum to use this information and turn the dmx values into a degree?
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Yes. I was a bit confused by @ben.coleman answer. The change would be only engine side in my opinion. The only reason why it might not work would be if a fixture is wrongly implemented. But you can copy it and make corrections. Vista does not even have to make the equation for them self’s anymore. Its really just a block of code and some front-end.

@Till The parameter info in the main screen has no interaction with the rest of the profile. Trust me, this isn’t just “a block of code” there is much more going on in the Fixture Editor.

To just slightly further expand on that, the person that originally designed and coded the fixture editor left Jands before CQ took over Vista. There are a number of workarounds that he performed to create fixtures that are completely undocumented. This is why a complete rebuild of this is on the docket however that is at the very minimum a multi-month project.

@ben.coleman Do I understand this correctly: If I give a MH a pan of 75% in the live programmer, the calculation of the DMX value is made by the Fixtureprofile itself rather then the fixture profile providing the main program with the information of having a 8 or 16 bit pan and the max pan range?

The max pan/tilt range as defined within the fixture profile has nothing to do with the DMX calculations.
They are purely used for the chooser icon visualization.

Experience also tells me that a fixture personality creator, be that ourselves or our official data supplier, may often have to take an educated guess as to the max pan/tilt range, as more often than not, fixture documentation is extremely poor. Those manufactures that do produce good documentation are in the minority rather than majority.

The Vista fixture profile defines 8 or 6bit, the DMX range for a particular feature and the result of that particular range - which for position is nearly always -100 > + 100 using a DMX range of 0-65535.

I dont think real world results would be any more useful than what we have already.
Sure you could do some maths to work out the DMX value per, theoretical, degree but how do you know the fixture actually does that with the quality of whatever motors or belts are in use.
Add on top of this, the profiles would need to define in which orientation the fixture sits at its manufacturer defined home value, plus that a lot of fixtures can adjust their movement ranges on the fly, either through menus or even DMX context channels. Andy finally, at the heart of it you are requesting a significant change to Vista’s generic fixture model.

Never say never… but to manage expectations, I wouldn’t expect to see this in Vista any time soon.

I don’t doubt that lighting control and programming will get to this point one day. Even with things like requesting a 26 degree beam angle from all fixtures. I’d be very surprised if we are still using DMX, Artnet or sACN to achieve it.

Even with all of that, a more accurate way of adding an offset would be much appreciated. The offset gets me close, but I’m often still tweaking things afterwards whereas a greater degree of accuracy into the offset options would make life a lot easier
Steve