I'm not sure what happened. I had a model setup running 12 candy canes together, all doing the same thing. Then I had them broken down into groups of three. For some reason it didn't like the names that I had, so I renamed them and it's working now.
Before I couldn't even get xlights to work on the versions between 2017.44 and 2018.3.
I'm glad to get it working and thanks for looking to see what could have been the issues.