How can I do ripple chasers that run in parallel but with time shift and not sequential?

[romandesign]

What I'm trying to do is for example to create a movement that has 4 moving heads doing exactly the same movement but shifted in time or spread to create a nice ripple or wave effect. This is done very often, and Onyx had a function that allows to spread a chaser between multiple fixtures so they start moving or changing colors one after another with a time shift. For example it can me a very simple motion 0-180-0 degrees repeated for several fixtures but with time shift. But as the next fixture starts moving long before the previous one has completed its motion, chaser doesn't seem to be how it's done, because it's sequential. And actually figuring out position of every fixture at the point of next movement start can be very difficult.

With my simple example it would be like that: the first one starts moving from left to right (0 to 180 degrees), starting at 0 degrees and when it's at 45 degrees angle, the secong one starts moving 0 to 180, then when the first one is at 90 degrees, second hits 45, third is at 0, then positions are 135 - 90 - 45 - 0, then 180 - 135 - 90 - 45, and then the fourth one starts going back and others finish in the same way. I hope I got the idea through. It gets very complicated very fast. But it's essentialy a very simple motion, just shifted in time between fixtures. Same can be done with color changes and intensity fades. Very pretty and should be simple, but I can't figure it out in QLC+. Onyx does it with a couple of clicks. I need shows to program songs for our band, so I can't use shows as "chasers" for such ripple effects. Is there a good way to do this and have it usable and reusable for show programming?

[Franzi]

efx

[romandesign]

A-ha. I looked deeper into that and it seems it's poissible to time-shift motions and dimmer, and despite what docs say I can add fixtures without pan and tilt. However so far in Fixture Monitor it doesn't seem to work with dimmer, as all PARs are black. I'm still waiting for my USB-DMX interface to arrive so can't test with real lights. If I load a scene into a chaser that lights all pars red, and then add EFX with dimmer in an oval, they all go black and that's it. Same in collection when I add those two together. Not sure what's going on, still trying to figure it out...

[sbenejam]

Take a look to the tutorials page.
https://www.qlcplus.org/tutorials.html #7 Positions and EFX
The cuelist widget has also a step mode that could be useful in some cases.

[romandesign]

Quelist can't be used in Shows, right? So that doesn't help. But it looks like I solved the big issue with a combination of EFX and changing channels on all lights from HTP to LTP. Not sure it's the way it's supposed to work, but at least now I can trigger a scene to set colors, then run EFX to do a light wave (or motion wave). I can do it inside a chaser, and then I can insert this chaser in a show track.

I also had an issue that when I insert a scene to a track the scene can disappear from functions page eventually, and if I delete the track the scene is deleted for sure. To work around that it seems that if I put a scene inside a chaser (Set it to run once, 0 sec. all timings) I can use that chaser to trigger color changes on a show track, and they stay this way because of LTP. I have no idea if that is the correct way, but at least now it looks feasible to program songs as shows without having to painstaikingly tweak all durations to match exactly.

[Franzi]

i would recommend this threat to read too:
viewtopic.php?f=29&t=13904

[romandesign]

Thanks. I think he's using cues/cuelists, which do not work with Show programming. I'm waiting for the USB-DMX interface to arrive to test my potential solution on real lights.