Some good news on this front — the new features for defining your own DMX fixtures and effects are coming out in a new release tomorrow.  The DMX menu now has menu items, “Create DMX effect…” and “Edit DMX effect”, which enable you to define the visual appearance of the effect using VDL and define the corresponding DMX channel values for the fixture.  Here’s a picture of the bottom of the dialog, as a teaser:  

Thanks Drew. I enabled the Ricasa catalog. However, I found an error in one of their effects. That is part number 044020294 44 MM WHITE W/RED TIP MOTORS MINE. The effects flies to 80m but should fly to 40m. What would be the best process to report this to Ricasa? Also, if you have any tips on how to do a quick fix for this effect, that would be greatly appreciated. I tried to study the effect parameters but could not find a cause for the wrong height.

Will,   I know we spoke about a new feature in Finale in which we would be able to set custom DMX values and then place that into the show on the timeline. Any update on when this would make its way into an alpha or beta release of the software?

Glad you figured it out. On a perhaps related note, Finale 3D will export soundtracks as mp3 in the future.

Hi PyroDad, for this kind of effect, VDL (typing descriptive words) isn’t the best option. To get a good sim, a better approach is to use the effect editor. The steps would be to create a basic effect, add it to your collection, then right click on it and select ‘Customize this effect simulation’s parameters…’. This opens the effect editor which allows essentially infinite customization and a degree of control that’s just not possible using VDL terms.   Alternatively, you don’t need to create a sim at all, because Ricasa already has a supplier catalog in Finale 3D with over 20,000 effects. You can add the catalog to your account by going to File > Catalogs of effects…

After trying something i may have figured it out lol

so i got myself a first gen pyrosure firing system and im having some issues with getting the music to play after I export it from finale3d because instead of exporting as an mp3 it exports it as a wav and if I copy and paste the music file directly to the usb from out of finale 3d it plays but is not in sync where it should be. any help would be nice

Hi fellow addicts,   How would you simulate the Ricasa 44mm “Red|Green|Yellow|White Lightning” single-shot effect with VDL? I’ve been trying all kind of options without getting close.   Starting at 1:04 or so.     Thanks.

No problem, here’s a video that demonstrates how to control the order of assignment for addresses. In other words, how to add modules to positions in the order you want them.

Drew, can you explain how to change all modules numbers to start from left to right and front to back?