Author Topic: Best way to animate text on "16 segment LED" style models?  (Read 336 times)

Offline telemonster

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Best way to animate text on "16 segment LED" style models?
« on: September 17, 2021, 05:28:53 PM »
Hello!

For my xLights expansion this year I am thinking about making lightweight window frames with either RGB pixel bullets or IP rated RGB pixel tape. I want to do it in the style of a 16 segment LED per window. Think of a normal 7 segment "8" but with an asterisk so it can do alpha characters as well. I am an pinball guy, and this is similar to old pinball displays.

I understand I think how to make the models and set up addressing.

What would be the best approach to being able to input text and animate it on such a model setup.

I was looking into the singing mouths effects but I don't think I can bend that enough.

So far I have a few ideas:

1. True type font that is similar to the segments. Scrolling wouldn't work I don't think since I need to rotate the entire monospace character per step. I could input text like "    ", "   t",  "  te",  " tes",  "test",  "est ", "st  ", "t    ",  type thing to scroll text in this manner.

2. Video file behind the segments. This might be an approach if I can generate a video file with freetype in linux by script or something. Would be difficult to do in a normal non-linear editor unless I can use Davinci Resolve with an machine generated XML config file or something. I don't like the difficulty in modifying this type of effect though.

3. Is there some other way to achieve this that I don't know about :-)

Thanks in advance for any pointers!!


Offline keithsw1111

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Re: Best way to animate text on "16 segment LED" style models?
« Reply #1 on: September 19, 2021, 01:24:27 AM »
Consider the state effect. It has 7 segment numbers built in using states on the model. Letters you will need to do yourself but not hard.


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Offline telemonster

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Re: Best way to animate text on "16 segment LED" style models?
« Reply #2 on: September 22, 2021, 10:48:47 AM »
Awesome! Exactly what I had in mind. I will poke at it a bit and prototype with it in software then consider building them if it works well.

Thanks much for the reply!