My weekend experience exporting Nutcracker to LSP...

[nutz4lights]

I am way behind on my show this year, mainly because Ray Wu has had my money for 10 weeks with no light delivery in site... so I decided to monkey around with Nutcracker this weekend, specifically, how to get spiraling megatree patterns into LSP. I watched the tutorials so that I could get familiar with Nutcracker and was quickly on my way... watched the hour long tutorial on how to export userpatterns.xml files correctly and was able to get that far... I should note that in the tutorial video, Scott can be heard repeatedly stressing the requirement to rename the export file exactly to userpatterns.xml and make sure it is in the correct directory... I don't know if that was a requirement of LSP 2.5 but with LSP 2.8, you can import whatever user patterns you want from any location and any file name... as long as the extension is .xml...

Anyway... my problem... as I said, I was able to get something imported into LSP, but it is all whacky and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with RGB channel orders, etc... so I thought I would outline what I did and see if this makes sense (the Nutcracker folks have been saying that you can do this for over a year now so I figure I have something setup incorrectly).

In Nutcracker: I created a model for a megatree, 24 strings, 100 pixels per string, 2 sections per string (that is telling it to go up and down I assume). I setup it up to start "bottom left" which I assume means that it will wrap the strings back counter-clockwise.

In LSP: I created an element for my megatree which includes 2400 pixels setup in RGB mode. When I draw the controller image, I select pattern B since mine starts at the bottom and goes up and down... I selected counter clock-wise (I also tried clockwise to see if that did anything and it didn't).... 48 strings with 50 pixels per string.

I said "whacky" above... what does that mean? I started off with spirals but moved to the bars effect. The bars are just horizontal sections of solid colors that go up or down. I set it up with one color, red... when I bring that into LSP and try to run it... I get a bunch of random reds, greens, blues... sounds like there is a mix-up in the RGB channel structure, no?

Any help is appreciated... in all honesty, I'm not sure it is going to make sense to have spirals this year... the file sizes that come through this process are just too huge... my core i7 with 6GB of RAM was totally chugging...

 

[burner]

My advice nutz4lights, is to walk away while you have some sanity left. See my post:
http://auschristmaslighting.com/forums/index.php/topic,4611.0.html
Nutcracker to LSP simply does not work! I worked with Charl and tried to get Nutcracker->LOR and then Charls Exported LOR file to LSP, but that imported seperate channels and I couldn't get it all into 1 channel.

I too was chasing the Spiral rainbow, but just like a normal rainbow, you'll never get to the end.

After 2 weeks of stuffing around and even having a 2 second clip to play with (so it was smaller) I have ended up drawing spirals in LSP manually. They're not quite the same, but they'll pass for now.
What makes it worse is both LSP and LOR enrypt their file exports (for demo versions), so unles you own both versions, or someone you know has the other version, it makes it diffucult to play with the XML file for testing.

Sorry to dissapoint you.

 

[nutz4lights]

Sadly that is what I was fearing... I committed to LSP, buying the high end version due to the fact that I plan on running around 6,000 pixels. I thought when I got into this that I read it was a piece of cake to get Nutcracker into LSP, LOR, etc. I tend to misread things from time to time

There must be some logical reason that things are not lining up, I mean, if you output 7200 channels going up/down, up/down etc. from one piece of software, and a second piece of software is setup identically, I would think that everything should line up.

 

[AAH]

I too was waiting on Ray recently so had a play with nutcracker. I got sick of waiting for Ray and not having my emails replied to so I mentioned paypal dispute resolution and had my lights sent the following day after getting an email back within hours. 4 unreplied emails and then those 3 magic words got an instant response.

 

[fasteddy]

What is it that you need to do in nutcracker that you cant seem to achieve in LSP

 

[mmulvenna]

I agree with Eddie, why not just use LSP macros. There is a video of the spirals in the LSP virtual Classroom.

 

[nutz4lights]

What is it that you need to do in nutcracker that you cant seem to achieve in LSP

Just spirals. I will check the virtual classroom as Mike referenced below. I don't remember seeing spirals there when I went through a bunch of the tutorials previously, but maybe I missed it.

 

[fasteddy]

I make my spirals by simply creating an image in MS word using the drawing tools,
I create a balck box and then just overlay a couple of coloured lines, I then use the snipit tool to save it as a jpg. I then use the image shifter macro and then just make it rotate left or right. This method allows you to create some interesting spirals that are not generic so you can make them look individual

 

[nutz4lights]

I too was waiting on Ray recently so had a play with nutcracker. I got sick of waiting for Ray and not having my emails replied to so I mentioned paypal dispute resolution and had my lights sent the following day after getting an email back within hours. 4 unreplied emails and then those 3 magic words got an instant response.

I figured it was taking this long because the order has 130 strings and 275 extension cords. I really waited too long to get it to him (paid on 9/02/2013) but I didn't want to rush into this order and get something wrong... I had already done that once this year with a 50 string order... I'm not too bummed out, I told myself this was going to be a 2 year project (based on the fact that I was trying to add close to 200 strings of RGB, either pixel or dumb) at a new house requiring a complete layout change... I will give him another few days and then use your magical three words

Thanks for the reply.

 

[nutz4lights]

I make my spirals by simply creating an image in MS word using the drawing tools,
I create a balck box and then just overlay a couple of coloured lines, I then use the snipit tool to save it as a jpg. I then use the image shifter macro and then just make it rotate left or right. This method allows you to create some interesting spirals that are not generic so you can make them look individual

That sounds interesting. I will have to try it out. I am one of those people that can't visualize turning a 2D flat image into a 3D conical shapes, let alone picturing the movement of that 2D image moving on the conical shape...

 

[fasteddy]

I make my spirals by simply creating an image in MS word using the drawing tools,
I create a balck box and then just overlay a couple of coloured lines, I then use the snipit tool to save it as a jpg. I then use the image shifter macro and then just make it rotate left or right. This method allows you to create some interesting spirals that are not generic so you can make them look individual

That sounds interesting. I will have to try it out. I am one of those people that can't visualize turning a 2D flat image into a 3D conical shapes, let alone picturing the movement of that 2D image moving on the conical shape...

One thing I did forget to mention is that you need to map that macros effect to your tree matrix so it will then rotate around the tree as apposed to just being on the front surface

 

[nutz4lights]

One thing I did forget to mention is that you need to map that macros effect to your tree matrix so it will then rotate around the tree as apposed to just being on the front surface

Would that be referring to the "map to object" instead of "map to stage" or is it a different mapping?

 

[Superman]

xlights Nutcracker has never worked with LSP,
However the old web based version of Nutcracker still can do the job.
http://nutcracker123.com/nutcracker
you don't have to worry about renameing the file as LSP now is able to import the .xml file in the patterns tab.

 

[fasteddy]

One thing I did forget to mention is that you need to map that macros effect to your tree matrix so it will then rotate around the tree as apposed to just being on the front surface

Would that be referring to the "map to object" instead of "map to stage" or is it a different mapping?

Its on the same screen as that but below the macro preview where you can map the macro effect to a matrix

 

[nutz4lights]

Hi guys,

Mike, I just went through the webinar video on the LSP site and I have a question. When using the corkscrew, even though the preview allows me to set the effect fatter, when I generate the effect it will only draw it as a skinny effect that is very dim. This does not happen when I do the adjacent up or down. Does anybody else see this?

These macros are exactly what I was looking for, but I want the corkscrew to work too.

Thanks,

-Louie