Hello from Oregon, OH

Dabil

New elf
Joined
Feb 1, 2017
Messages
10
Hey I guess I should post here since I have already started to post on here.

Quick about me, I have always loved Christmas lights. I take my family to the Toledo zoo lights every year. (They have over a million lights). I have always wanted to do an epic light show, but never really saw anything that inspired me to do it until I went to see the Wynn Road Christmas lights here in Oregon this past year. Before the show was even over I was googling trying to figure out how to do it.

I have been abscessed ever since lol. My planned show for 2017 is about 3800 lights, all 12mm bullet pixels.

Xlights Set-Up.jpg

16x50 mega tree
4 leaping arches with 11 spoke fan
2 24x24 pixel matrices

The roofline and both dormers all have a top and bottom row of pixel lights and 3,4,5,4 icicles below those.

My technical background is I have 2 undergraduate degrees, one in Computer Science, the other in Industrial Electrical Maintenance and Automation.

Following advice I read on another forum I tried a few different sequencers. I started with HLS, but found it over tedious, then moved to Vixen3, which I really liked, especially liked the ability to put groups in groups to have a nice clean logical layout to sequence from. Downside of Vixen for me was how tedious it was to set-up the preview. Probably this was exaggerated for me since my show design was evolving daily since I was still trying to figure out what my layout would look like.

Finally I tried xlights and really was blown away. Super easy to set-up the lights and create the house preview. I have sequenced 5 complete songs now in xlights. I notice the latest beta has the ability to put groups in groups now, which I liked a lot in Vixen3. I find the views pretty confusing still, but I have a system.

Originally when I started sequencing in xlights I would just add all models and groups to the sequence. Which was a bit cumbersome I came to find. I did that because I didn't know you could drill down inside a group by double clicking it. I have since wanted to go back and remove the individual models and just leave the groups. But, I am a little confused how to do that. Send like when I delete an individual model from the view, all the sequencing on that model is deleted too. Even though when I drill down into the group where that model is, I see the effects there to. So not sure how to fix that.

BTW, thanks so much for the xlights tutorials on YouTube, I have found them to be an invaluable resource!

If anyone is interested I will post some house previews of my shows from xlights as soon as I figure out how to record it. I tried using fraps, but it won't record the house preview, it just records the timeline. Doesn't look like there is a way to generate a video of the house preview anyway in xlights. Maybe I will ask for that to be added on the xlights forum feature request.

Anyway, cheers.
 

Dabil

New elf
Joined
Feb 1, 2017
Messages
10
Okay I managed to figure out how to record my house preview in XLights using Windows 10 game bar. Here is my adaptation of the Star Wars Funk sequence Logandc99 put on nutcracker123.com


View: https://vimeo.com/203881108


A few things about it. I happen to think that fans on the ID of a leaping arch adds a lot of interesting effects possibilities as you'll see in the video I wore them out lol. Also you'll notice I redid some of the animation to fit my 24x24 matrices over the windows.
 

fasteddy

I have C.L.A.P
Global moderator
Joined
Apr 26, 2010
Messages
6,648
Location
Albion Park NSW
Welcome to ACL, looks like you have big plans for 2017. Im sure with all the information online you will be able to achieve you goals
 

Dabil

New elf
Joined
Feb 1, 2017
Messages
10
Thanks for the welcome! Funny thing that video is not viewable from tapatalk, but does work from the regular forum on my desktop. I wonder why?

Sent from my SM-G920V using Tapatalk
 
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