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BryanCrotaz / blender-artnet

Blender script to push artnet data to Evee lights
GNU General Public License v3.0
37 stars 8 forks source link

Setup difficulties #12

Open daniel-polak opened 2 years ago

daniel-polak commented 2 years ago

I was just as excited to use this plugin as everybody else who discovered it and realized what it could do. So I downloaded the latest version of Blender (2.93.5) and the add-on installation worked just fine.

After a couple of hours of messing around, I just can't seem to get this thing to react to ArtNet. Afaik I did everything according to the readme. The point of this issue is there are no facilities to troubleshoot with. If only the add-on could tell me it actually received a valid artnet packet and show the DMX values.

Which platforms is this supported/tested on? Does it work with the loopback interface 127.0.0.1? What are recommended troubleshooting procedures?

Thanks

BryanCrotaz commented 2 years ago

I've tested it on Blender 2.93.0 with loopback and I know others use it this way.

The best way to monitor it is to run the script in a debugger and see what you see in the output console.

BryanCrotaz commented 2 years ago

If you'd like to add a debugging output to the UI showing packet count received I'd be happy to accept a PR

BryanCrotaz commented 2 years ago

I've just tested with QLC PLus on Windows, with QLC and Blender on the same machine.

I've added a spot light, set fixture type to pointe, Universe to 1 and Base DMX to 1. I've added a Robe Pointe in QLC and moved it around in the Simple Desk. The light moves in Blender.

Check that you've allowed Blender and QLC to have network access via the firewall. When I first used them the Windows Firewall gave me a popup to enable network access.

Check in the Window menu that you haven't accidentally disabled ArtNet.

daniel-polak commented 2 years ago

Many thanks for the reaction. I actually spent some time troubleshooting this. I'd like to submit some useful info that helped the setup process perhaps as a PR do the readme?. Is that welcome?

Anyways when I first tried QLC+ I could not get it to work, then I tried QLab and it worked (pretty much followed your steps above). Later I got QLC to work. I haven't the slightest idea why it wasn't working earlier. (I know for sure it didn't receive any ArtNet packets as I added a print("something") to the part of the code which I guessed would run when an ArtNet packet is received)

I know I should write the following in separate issues but it's kinda topic-related and I don't want to spam.

use of old-school tungsten My setup is almost all conventionals. I tried creating a fixture type with just "dimmer" and "lumens" defined and got some weird errors or the add-on would constantly reset the color and beam angle. (Workaround = use "Drivers", a Blender feature, to block any change.) Also, are there any restrictions on what the name of the fixture can be? Can I use numbers? Spaces?

Port setup issues We all know ArtNet uses UDP port 6454. If another program is using it, the add-on thows an error (which can only be seen in debug mode - not too user friendly tbh). Workaround = start Blender first, then any other app that uses the same port.

[bug] universe number doesn't matter? I sadly don't yet have steps to reproduce, but at one point it didn't matter what the universe setting was on the sending device (receiving was universe 1) Use case were this was of concern: sending artnet from QLab through QLC to Blender.

All of my messing around was done on MacOS version 11.6 with Blender 2.93.5 and sending ArtNet data through the loopback interface

BryanCrotaz commented 2 years ago

Definitely split this into issues - they're very different. All good quality PRs are welcomed, whether to code or docs.