Setting an override colour via a touch screen is a relatively simple task in Pharos Designer. You pick your colour on the colour wheel and use the Set RGB action to set your lights to match. This can also be easily done with sliders; one for red, one for green and one for blue. But what if you want to mix and match?
In this Tips & Tricks, we will be covering how you can keep your sliders and your colour wheel in sync. This means that when you change the colour wheel, the sliders will show the correct RGB levels (respectively), and when you move the sliders, the pin on the colour wheel will also show at the correct RGB values.
To get started, let’s create a simple Touch Interface with a colour wheel and 3 sliders. There is a default option for this in the Interface Layout page called 3 Slider Colour
This will create an interface with a slider labelled Red, a slider labelled Green and a slider labelled Blue, as well as a colour picker.
We will rename the keys on each of these sliders to match the colours: redSlider001, greenSlider001 and blueSlider001.
This allows us to easily find the sliders when on the Triggers page.
First, click on the red slider, then in the Properties panel, change the key, as shown below.
Now, to link the Colour Wheel to the sliders, add a new trigger Touch Colour Change and set the colour picker to colour001. This will fire whenever the colour picker is interacted with.
We also want to attach the action Set Control Value. For this functionality to work, first we need to enable variables. This is done by clicking the … next to the action type, then selecting Enable Variables.
Once that has been done, you will see new fields appear next to each option.
- For the first action, we want to change the Red slider to match the red value of the colour picker. To do this, we will set the Control to redSlider001. This is the control we are looking to affect.
- We then set the Index to 1. As this is a slider, there is only 1 value available (this will change for the colour picker).
- Finally, we want to set the Value to Variable 1. The colour picker will provide 3 variables; variable 1 will be red, variable 2 will be green, and variable 3 will be blue.
Your action should now look like this:
To quickly set up the other sliders, duplicate this action 2 more times using the context menu or toolbar button…
… then change the Control for the 2nd instance to greenSlider001, and the Variable to 2, and for the 3rd instance to blueSlider001 and the Variable to 3.
Your actions should now look like this:
Uploading now, we see that moving the colour picker will move the sliders! However, this isn’t true for the inverse, so let’s set that up next.
Add a new trigger Touch Slider Move. This trigger will fire when a specified slider is moved.
For the first trigger, we will be setting the Slider to redSlider001.
Attach another Set Control Value action to this trigger and set the control to colour001 (or the key for your colour picker). We’ll keep the index as 1, and ensure the value is set to variable 1.
As we are affecting the value on the colour picker, there are 3 indexes available for the control value; index 1 will be red, index 2 will be green, and index 3 will be blue.
Now, to quickly setup the actions for the other sliders, we’ll duplicate the trigger two more times. This will also duplicate the action. We will change the 2nd trigger to greenSlider001, and set the index to 2, and blueSlider001 and index 3 for the 3rd trigger.
When this is uploaded, your sliders will be aligned to your colour picker, and vice versa. To these triggers, we now want to attach the action Set RGB. This is the action that overrides your fixtures during playback, but we won’t be covering it in more detail here. More information on the action can be found in the Help here.