In the video chat on Monday, someone was asking about modeling a sphere in xlights. I know that question has come up before too. Right now xlights doesn't have a model for a sphere. As Sean pointed out during the chat, you can still generate effects for that using a matrix and putting the effects on the matrix. My understanding is that for any model, xlights essentially converts it into a matrix anyway to put the effects on it. So essentially a Mega tree is only a matrix with a narrow top and wide bottom. Using that concept, I have created a spreadsheet that will take a matrix, like he suggested using to put effects on a sphere, and will give you the node locations that you can use to generate a custom sphere model, so you can see what the effect on a sphere will look like.
The instruction for how to do this are on the first tab of the spreadsheet. It is a little slow to run because I have it set up to generate up to a 500x500 custom model, so if you have an older machine, it may take a few seconds to open and recalculate.
While I am sure that you can put some effects on this custom model for the sphere and have them look good, I think of this more as a model for viewing effects generated on a matrix that you set up for the sphere (both with the same set of channel numbers). Putting an effect like bars moving left to right on the matrix will look good on the sphere model. Putting that same effect on the sphere model isn't going to look quite as good in my opinion. One of the many nice things about xlights is that you can play around with it and see what looks best to you.
Any feedback on this would be appreciated. This started as something much smaller for my own use, but tried to modify it to make it simple for others to use. Not sure if that happened or not.
