VRSL DMX: Lighting Your World
This guide will help you set up light fixtures in your VRChat world, and making a Dummy Rig for other light engineers to easily create shows for your venue.
Once you have VRSL installed in your project (see this page on how to do so), you can begin placing the DMX Fixtures using the prefabs provided by the VRSL Control Panel
Before we can place fixtures, we must decide the DMX form factor for our venue. This is because there are separate prefabs of each fixture depending on form factor for optimization reasons. VRSL will automatically place the correct fixtures for the form factor selected, so it's easiest to decide this first. This decision is not permanent.
The vertical form factor will be placed at the right of a 16:9 video. It supports ~1.7 Universes (871 Channels). The vertical orientation suits venues which prefer square UV mappings.
The horizontal form factor will be placed at the bottom of a 16:9 video. It supports ~3 Universes (1560 Channels). The horizontal orientation suits venues which prefer rectilinear UV mappings. It also provides the most available DMX channels.
The legacy form factor is used by venues made with previous versions of VRSL and included for compatibility. If creating a new venue, you should not use this.
To set this value, open the VRSL Control Panel and change the DMX Grid Mode option.
Now we can begin placing prefabs.
In the VRSL Control Panel, expand the Show Options dropdown.
Expand the Show DMX Prefab Spawn Buttons dropdown.
This menu contains every prefab you'll need to spawn.
The DMX Reader Screens are the entry points for the video feed into Unity.
- (USharp Video Player) utilizes a video player, and is to go in the uploaded version of the VRChat world.
- (Desktop to Editor) utilizes uDesktopDuplication, and is to go in the Dummy Rig of your VRChat world.
The Fixture Prefabs buttons will spawn a prefab according to the current DMX Grid Mode setting.
The Use Old 13 Channel Lights option is again for compatibility and should not be used by new venues.
You are now ready to populate your world with DMX Fixtures. Remember that the amount you can place is not infinite! For every fixture you place, you must have room to patch it.
The final step before the lights are ready is patching.
If you are unfamiliar with DMX, you can read about patching in the DMX appendix entry.
Also, it can help immensely if you create your venue's patch sheet at the same time you are patching the fixtures within Unity, as spreadsheet software can do a lot of the work for you. Follow this guide, resuming here once you have the patch sheet.
To patch a fixture with VRSL, select the prefab so you can see the VRSL Stage Lighting_DMX Script.
Here, you can edit the DMX Channel and Universe fields to designate the lights address.
Once your fixtures are patched, they can be now be controlled by sending a video to the DMX video screen!
Due to the limited universe count of VRSL, it is highly recommended to be efficient with how you map your fixtures whenever possible.
Using the Invert Pan and Invert Tilt functionalities to create mirrored setups are one of the best ways to minimize the number of unique fixtures needed.
A Dummy Rig is a unity scene with bare minimum objects to give a lighting engineer the feeling of the venue. The light prefabs should be set up with their proper settings and positions, essentially mimicking the actual rig that would be inside of VRChat.
This Dummy Rig allows lighting engineers to see what the lights would look like in VRChat in real time. The Dummy Rig should be provided to lighting engineers by the venue owner via a Unity Package File.
If making a Dummy Rig, remember that it only needs the fixtures and fake props made from cubes or other simple geometry in the original world, with similar lighting and post processing so that the lighting engineers have an idea of how the lighting is set up.
After fixtures are set up, you will need to replace your regular video player with one that can run off of a local source to receive data.
Since the 9-Universe Update, the TekOSC Reader has been implemented into VRSL. This enables the Grid Node to directly send DMX data via OSC into unity, without the need for an OBS preview and uDesktopDuplication. This is now the recommended method to use for Dummy Rigs, but the uDesktopDuplication reader prefabs still exist for legacy use.
You can find the TekOSC Grid readers in Packages/com.acchosen.vr-stage-lighting/Runtime/Prefabs/DMX/GridReader, simply select the corresponding -H or -V prefab depending on your grid orientation.
uDesktopDuplication readers can still be found under Packages/com.acchosen.vr-stage-lighting/Runtime/Prefabs/DMX/{horizontal or vertical} Mode/DMX Reader Screens.
Finally, export your Dummy Rig as a separate scene in a unity package file and can be easily accessible to your venue performers.