The LSX tutorials thread!

[cfavreau]

Okey Dokey.

I have it now. Thanks everyone! Swami ... I used your technique. CMD - The effect I am using is a dynamic animation with the music... I am not sure if that will work quite right.. but it is good to know for the future.

To make an event affect multiple tracks as in building a compound effect;

1) Right Click on Event (just as you said)
2) Select Edit Properties of this event
3) Select the tracks you want to make it affect in the "Influence Output Track" area by checking the track check boxes.
*** Track 00 apparently cannot be selected... no big deal.

[swamidog]

track 00 is probably an internal buffer or something reserved for the system. i imagine it's much like frame 0 in the cat sequence.

Okey Dokey.

I have it now. Thanks everyone! Swami ... I used your technique. CMD - The effect I am using is a dynamic animation with the music... I am not sure if that will work quite right.. but it is good to know for the future.

To make an event affect multiple tracks as in building a compound effect;

1) Right Click on Event (just as you said)
2) Select Edit Properties of this event
3) Select the tracks you want to make it affect in the "Influence Output Track" area by checking the track check boxes.
*** Track 00 apparently cannot be selected... no big deal.

[cfavreau]

Ugh... so it is clear to me that what I want to do can be accomplished with the "Influence Output Track" area...... but what exactly do these do? I have gotten it to work for 1 set... but as soon as I duplicate the effects to make 2 effects and give the common shift X different directions ... it all gets screwed up.

I have 2 animation events and a common Shift Y. I assign the animation1 to Track 1, animation2 to Track 2 and the Shift Y to track 3. I set the Shift Y up to influence Tracks 1 and 2 and set it to linear with a shift from 0 to 0.25.

I assign the second set: animation3 to Track 5, animation6 to Track 6 and ShiftY event to Track 7. i set the Shift Y to influence Tracks 5 and 6 and set it to linear with a shift from 0 to -0.25.

The effect is not what I expected. One of the animations moves and the other doesn't indicating that there is some interaction between the 2 shiftY's or something. I am confused.

I did get it to work by just selecting a track above each one for the influence output track.. why? No clue... probably that is the problem... my cluelessness about it.

[swamidog]

i'm not sure how you're duplicating effects, but...

even though you may have a single SFX loop event on the timeline, any duplicates within the SFX loop are considered separate tracks for the sake of the influence control panel.

Ugh... so it is clear to me that what I want to do can be accomplished with the "Influence Output Track" area...... but what exactly do these do? I have gotten it to work for 1 set... but as soon as I duplicate the effects to make 2 effects and give the common shift X different directions ... it all gets screwed up.

I have 2 animation events and a common Shift Y. I assign the animation1 to Track 1, animation2 to Track 2 and the Shift Y to track 3. I set the Shift Y up to influence Tracks 1 and 2 and set it to linear with a shift from 0 to 0.25.

I assign the second set: animation3 to Track 5, animation6 to Track 6 and ShiftY event to Track 7. i set the Shift Y to influence Tracks 5 and 6 and set it to linear with a shift from 0 to -0.25.

The effect is not what I expected. One of the animations moves and the other doesn't indicating that there is some interaction between the 2 shiftY's or something. I am confused.

I did get it to work by just selecting a track above each one for the influence output track.. why? No clue... probably that is the problem... my cluelessness about it.

[colouredmirrorball]

I don't even know if it is possible to influence more SFX tracks with the properties of an event. It never worked quite right for me anyway, so I always use the alternative: Rend2Frame. This works in real time as well! Just place a Rend2Frame event under the first two animation events, open it and select an empty .pic file slot. Place another animation event and set it to this .pic file. Do the same for the other three animation events (Rend2Frame renders everything above it until it encounters the top of the timeline or another rend2frame event).

Rend2Frame is very useful for when output tracks doesn't quite work, for effecting all the iterations in a loop event and all the letters in a RunText event. It's also a way to determine the total point count for a show, in the frame picker it shows the number of points of each pic file, so if you render the whole show to a frame, you can see how much the point rate is.

[cfavreau]

Thanks! I will give that a try when I get some time. I found that I can just play with the influence track check boxes and it works if I get the right magic numbers. I think what happens is that one set influences the other some how.... not 100% sure. I am sure this is a problem with my brain no comprehending something.

[SaltyRobot]

Last night I played around with the influence track check boxes for a show I am making. I found that if I did the select all check box I was able to influence everything above the effect and it worked perfectly. This worked out in my case because I was only influencing 4 lines above my effect and then there were no events above that (Blank track outputs).

[cfavreau]

Yeah I got it to work for a single instance. I ran into trouble when I had 2 effects that needed influencing separately an consequently when I put them SFX loops and ran them at the same time in the timeline.

[SaltyRobot]

I am wanting to use an SFX loop to duplicate a pattern using z rotation with loop in the expression. I understand that I control how many duplicates there are by placing a number inside Duplicate Count in the SFX event. Is there a way that I can have this duplicate count number change over time? Let's say for the 1st quarter of the event the count is zero then 1 for the next quarter and then the last quarter the duplicate count is 3. I realize I can just put 4 SFX loops back to back but just looking for a different way.

[colouredmirrorball]

Yes, you can use expressions in the loop count. It automatically rounds either up or down to the neirest integer (don't have the program open atm and the license key is upstairs, so figure out yourself where it rounds to). You could use 4*etime and it should work. Also see post #109 in this thread.