The Control panel
Control is where you operate the rig without a console. Properties says what a fixture is; Control says what it is doing.
Select one or more fixtures and open Control in the left sidebar. It stays in the sidebar when nothing is selected and says so, rather than disappearing.
The rule: Properties is what it is, Control is what it does
Properties holds the facts that outlive any look: name, number, type, patch, position, rotation, and how the motors are rigged. Control holds what the fixture is doing right now: intensity, the gel, the lamp, zoom, gobos, colour, pan and tilt. Nothing appears in both.
If you were taught an older layout, intensity, the gel and the lamp used to be in Properties. They moved here.
What the panel holds
- Intensity
- Always first, and the one control every fixture has. It works without any GDTF profile, because it is the fixture's offline preview level rather than a DMX channel
- Physical
- What a person changes on the body by hand: the lamp in a PAR and how it is clocked, a profile's lens tube (Zoom) and barrel (Focus), and the gel. These are not channels: on a conventional you turn a knob or swap a lamp
- GDTF channels
- Everything else the profile defines: zoom, iris, colour mixing, gobo and colour wheels, prism, shutter, frost, pan and tilt. Wheels show a row of buttons with each slot's own swatch or gobo picture; everything else is a slider labelled with the fixture's real range
A fixture shows only the physical controls it actually has. A moving head shows none, because it has no hand-set optics. Nothing is hidden by a rule about "conventionals": each fixture body declares what a person can change on it, and the panel draws that.
Gels
The gel picker searches a catalogue that spans brands and is far too long to scroll. Search by code first: 181 finds L181, because that is how filters are named in practice. Names work too (Congo, blue).
Only fixtures with a gel frame offer a gel: profiles, PARs and generic dimmers. A blinder does not, and neither does an LED par, a bar, a scanner or a moving head; those get their colour natively or from a channel. If you remember gelling a blinder, that was a scroller, which is a DMX device: it appears as a colour wheel in the channel list, not as a frame.
A gel already saved on a fixture that no longer offers one still renders. Nothing you built is silently discarded.
Pan and tilt find home
Both axes have a ⌂ button that puts them back at home exactly, and dragging either slider catches at home as it passes. A pan slider covers several hundred degrees in a couple of hundred pixels, so landing on zero by hand is luck.
Only dragging catches. Arrow keys on a focused slider still step exactly, which is how you set a value a degree or two off home.
Home is not always zero on the slider: it is where the GDTF says the fixture rests. A fixture whose declared travel never reaches that pose has no catch and no button.
Greyed-out controls
A greyed-out control means the fixture can do it and FlexViz cannot show it. It does not mean the fixture lacks the feature. The control stays in place, disabled, so the panel does not quietly misrepresent the rig. There are three reasons:
A desk has the fixture. With a console live through the Bridge, the desk's values win; see below.
Reset, lamp or service channels. The fixture has them, and there is nothing on stage for them to change.
Motor-speed faders, on every fixture that has one. FlexViz moves heads at their real speed, but takes that from the profile's own travel and acceleration times, not from this channel.
Pure maintenance channels (lamp on/off, fans, display, calibration, manufacturer macros) are not listed at all, so they do not bury the greyed-out controls that tell you something.
Selecting several fixtures
Select several of the same fixture and the panel is unchanged: every change applies to all of them.
A mixed selection only offers what every selected fixture can do. Select a moving head and a PAR and there is little left, because a PAR has no gobo wheel. Two fixtures that both have "a gobo wheel" are not necessarily operated together either: if their wheels hold different gobos, the wheel is withheld, while what they genuinely share (zoom, say) stays available. Otherwise one click would put a Breakup in one fixture and Dots in the other, with the panel showing only one of those names. When selected fixtures disagree on a wheel they do share, it reads Mixed.
Offline values and a live desk
Everything in Control is an offline design value, exactly like Intensity. The 3D view follows each change at once: colour, beam angle, gobo, prism. The moment a console starts sending on a fixture's address through the Bridge, the desk's values replace them outright, and the panel is greyed out for that fixture. A gobo picked here disappears the moment the desk sends its own.
To keep a state of the rig you built here, save it as a look; see Saved views and looks.
Reset fixtures
The circular-arrows button on the toolbar puts every fixture's channels back to its own GDTF defaults, so an experimented-with scene returns to a known starting point.
It ignores the selection. Every fixture in the scene is reset.
A default is not zero. A zoom lands where the profile says, a wheel on its first slot, pan and tilt at home. The rig is not necessarily lit afterwards.
Anything aimed with Point2Focus comes back to home.
It does not touch intensity, the gel, the lamp or any other hand-set setting, nor anything in Properties: placement, patch, numbering, groups, layers.
One undo step, however many fixtures changed.
Greyed out while a desk is driving the rig, and for read-only viewers.
Reset orientation in the Edit menu is something else: it re-hangs the selected fixtures and touches no channel.
When a fixture shows dark specks
A faulty 3D model (one shipped without normals is the usual case) used to black out the whole viewport. Now it costs a few dark specks on that one object. If you see them, the fixture's model is broken; please report it.