Fixture Profiles and Visualiser Icons Explained

You may find that when you load a fixture into Show Buddy Active, it displays too many icons, or not enough icons on the visualiser, or doesn’t display colours correctly. This indicates that the fixture needs some tweaking to work with SBA.

SBA examines each fixture to find the “heads”, and each head is displayed on the visualiser as a separate icon. For example, an RGB parcan has one head, an 8-channel dimmer pack has 8 heads, an LED strip with 6 RGBAW sections has 6 heads.

SBA creates heads according to these rules:

If there is at least one Dimmer channel, and no RGBAW channels, create a head for each Dimmer channel;
If there is at least one RGB/RGBA/RGBW/RGBAW block, create a head for each block;
Otherwise, create a single head.

In addition:

RGBAW and Dimmer channels must be defined as type “D” in the fixture file.
RGBAW must be named “red”, “Red”, “R”, “green”, “Green”, “G” etc in the fixture file.

These simple rules will cover most popular fixtures. However, the more fiddly fixtures present a problem – not just for SBA, but for every DMX visualiser out there. I’m thinking of those ‘adventurous’ fixtures that try to combine a laser, two moonflowers, a toaster oven and an electric toothbrush on one convenient t-bar.

For those more complex fixtures, it’s usually best to split it into several fixture files , one for each logical section of fixtures.