How to Build an RGB MegaTree
Posted by JEC on October 14th, 2011
23' RGB Megatree, in blue and white.
Happy Friday!
Fall is finally here. Love this season.
A lighting designer here in town was considering a giant Christmas tree as part of a December production. So very late last night, we hauled some gear over to his rehearsal space and set up a demo system.
The twenty three foot tall tree (it could be more, but we ran out of flying space) is based 48 StellaGreen RGB strings and 3 of our new E16-II node controllers.
Complete control over the tree requires 24 universes of DMX data. That’s more than twelve thousand control channels. However, since we left ‘practical’ behind several years ago, this is not a problem at all. Frame rate is 44 Hz.
More details about the green strings and controller will be posted very shortly. For now, though, here’s some stills and video from the evening:
Note: I wish I’d remembered to take a photo with a person standing next to tree, just to give some sense of scale. This tree is enormous. And beautiful. For rev2, the base will be bigger and the strings held with more tension. In theory, the result will look a bit less like the famous Sorting Hat.
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Thanks!
October 16th, 2011 at 4:53 pm
WOW really WOW
October 19th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
Amazing. Keep up the good work.
October 19th, 2011 at 1:38 pm
Thanks for the kind words, Jerry & Roland. It’s been a fun project.
October 19th, 2011 at 2:16 pm
I still look forward to the day you get these onto the Rockefeller Center tree.
October 20th, 2011 at 7:29 am
Very nice. Just out of curiosity, how do you create the sequences for those “swirly smokey” patterns that start at 1:36?
November 11th, 2011 at 11:26 am
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December 5th, 2011 at 8:39 pm
[...] How to Build an RGB MegaTree [...]