What would you do?

[Jeff Millard]

I have a pixel prop I made from 4" PVC. I took a 9" plastic ball from a fan lamp and attached it to the PVC after painting candy cane stripes spiraling around it. There are three bright pixels in the ball and 39 node on a ribbon spiraled around the pole. It came out nice, and I'll use it between arches. On the layout I'm trying to decide how I want it to model. If you look directly at the prop you can see 6 nodes of ribbon across 4 sweeps, and 4 are hidden on the backside of the prop. I have it modeled in a zig-zag 6 the 4 then 6 then 4 etc... But I guess that will cause the pixels on the back of the prop to run in the wrong direction. So I'm trying to decide: Should I just make the layout a single sweep ( / ) or just extend each of the four zigs and have no zags. (does this make any sense?) I understand the problem with 360 degree models but this would've been a terror to make with no pixels on the back. I've never had it as part of an xLights model before, so when I sequenced it I just had effects chase the length of the 39 nodes. Now that I can spread an effect across 7 of them and 6 arches, this issue comes up.

What would you do to model it? I hope to get a couple of them hooked up soon so I can actually see what will happen. But I'm just looking for ideas if anyone is interested.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Gilrock]

Model it as a simple spiral tree for the pole.

[Jeff Millard]

Perfect! Thank you. But, now that I know you can do this... This thought of a spiral tree won't go away!

Help...

Jeff

[Jeff Millard]

OK, after creating this model something odd has appeared. First, let me describe the prop a little closer. The spiral is RGB ribbon. The ball is GRB nodes. So after making the spiral as Gilrock suggested, I created to ball separately so I could reorder the color to GRB and set it as the next prop after the pole it's on. If I add a red color effect to the node in a sequence, the prop actually lights up red as desired. So I added the model to the group of "North Poles" When I add a red color effect to the group, it shows up green on the node and turns the prop on green. I've added a screen shot of the result. The first effect is red directly added to the node, in the second effect the red was added to the group.

2020.02

Jeff

[Jeff Millard]

I found the problem. I created the Ball Props and set them to follow the Spirals, but didn't get each spiral to then follow the balls. They were still set to follow each other. So the first 3 nodes of Spirals 2-7 were set to the same channels as the 3 nodes in the balls. All is working now.

Jeff

[Gilrock]

Cool...glad you got your balls sorted out.

[Jeff Millard]

Balls... wait for it... and poles, thank you very much.

Jeff