Core Concepts
How Spectralite turns fixtures, effects, and color into DMX on the wire.
Spectralite works as one signal flow. You define a set of fixtures, then build and stack effects for them. The engine solves the resulting device-independent color onto your real hardware and sends it as DMX packets on your network. Every panel in the app works on one stage of that flow.
Each stage below links to a page with the full details. The stages appear in the order of their dependencies, and that order is also the path a signal takes through the app.
The pipeline, stage by stage
First, you describe your hardware. A fixture is one controllable light: a par, a moving head, an LED bar, or a pixel strip. You patch each fixture to a DMX address and a universe so the engine knows which channels drive it. Nothing renders until at least one fixture exists.
Next you place those fixtures. A fixture layout records where each fixture sits in 3D space. Some effects move light across your rig, such as a chase from left to right or a wave that rolls outward. These effects read the layout to know which pixel is where. Without a layout, an effect has no positions to work with.
Then you build the look. An effect is a graph of connected nodes that computes a color for every pixel. The engine compiles it into a GPU program that runs per pixel each frame. A layer binds one effect to one layout and renders it with an opacity and a blend behavior. You stack layers to combine looks. Lower layers sit underneath, and higher layers composite on top.
Layers run on a clock measured in beats. The timeline schedules when each layer is active on a grid of sixteen slots per bar. The grid lets a layer pulse on specific beats and stay off between them. When you set your tempo, the whole stack follows it, so effects land on the music.
At render time the engine resolves everything to color. You author one device-independent color, a point in a standard color space, and the engine solves that single value onto each fixture's actual emitters. An RGB par and a color-mixing mover both show the color you picked, because the solve accounts for the emitters each one carries.
Finally the resolved color leaves the machine as output. Spectralite packs each fixture's channels into DMX universes and sends them over your network as Art-Net or sACN to your nodes and fixtures.
Follow the flow
Read these in order the first time. Each one assumes the stage before it.
Fixtures
What a fixture is, and how you patch it to a DMX address and universe.
Layouts
Placing fixtures in 3D space so spatial effects know where each pixel is.
Effects and Layers
Building effects, stacking them as layers, and how opacity and blend combine them.
Beat Time
The beat-based clock and the sixteen-slots-per-bar timeline grid.
Color
Author one color. Spectralite solves it onto every fixture's real emitters.
Output
From resolved color to DMX universes on the wire over Art-Net and sACN.
Glossary
Every term in one place, A to Z.