Fixture profiles

When a console drives OmnaDMX, mostly in DMX Motion, raw channel values mean nothing until you say which channel is intensity, which is colour, which is the gobo. A fixture profile is that map. It makes the device present as a moving-head-style fixture the console already knows how to drive.

What a profile maps

A profile gives each DMX channel (or channel pair) a role:

• Intensity / dimmer — master level.
• Colour wheel — a stepped wheel of named colours. The channel value picks a slot, which the engine resolves to a palette colour.
• Gobo — a wheel of named textures (the standard gobo names, Bars, Stripes, and the rest). The channel value picks which texture renders. It comes two ways. Indexed snaps value ranges to discrete gobo slots, like a real gobo wheel where each band is one gobo. Continuous sweeps smoothly through the texture space instead of stepping.
• Gobo rotation — rotates the selected texture. Bipolar means centre is stopped and each side is a direction and speed; indexed means value bands set fixed rotation states.
• Motion axes — the desk axes that steer the engine’s movement in DMX Motion.

The engine renders live DMX through the profile, so a colour-wheel value becomes a palette colour, a gobo value becomes a texture, and the motion axes push the pattern around. The operator works in moving-head terms.

Choosing or building one

In the DMX tab you pick a profile from the built-in catalog or build a Custom one. A custom profile is where you set, per channel, its role, and for wheels the value-to-slot table — which byte ranges select which colour or gobo. Build it to match the personality your console is sending so the channels line up. The standard gobo names are fixed vocabulary; a profile chooses which gobos and what ranges select them, it doesn’t rename them.

Verify with the live snapshot

The DMX tab shows a live desk snapshot. It decodes the incoming frame through the active profile and shows the resolved colour and texture, not raw bytes. Use it to confirm each fader does what you expect — a wrong colour wheel or a shifted range is obvious here, before it’s a problem on stage.

When profiles apply

Profiles matter for desk-driven modes, mainly DMX Motion. Pattern mode runs the device’s own engine, so no profile is involved. In DMX Pixels the desk addresses pixels directly (see Multi-universe addressing), so there’s no profile there either.

That’s the DMX / Art-Net / sACN track. For programmatic control, see the Reference.