Pattern engine & motion

The pattern engine makes light when nothing is driving pixels directly: Pattern mode, and the detail layer of DMX Motion. You build a pattern from a few expressive parameters, pick a palette, and put any parameter in motion. It all applies live, in the visualizer and on the LEDs.

A pattern: engine, parameters, palette

The engine is the rendering style. There are fourteen, from soft brushed fields, phosphor trails, and waves through tiles, sparkle and scatter, plasma, heat and ozone, coral, bokeh, meteor-streak Perseid, electric Surge, an interactive Pong, and a flat Solid. The engine sets the character; the parameters below shape it. Switching engine keeps your parameters and palette, so you can audition engines against the same pattern.

Texture is the engine’s discrete sub-style, a gobo-like variant. It’s a stepped choice, and which textures exist depends on the engine.

Five continuous parameters, each 0–100% in the UI:

Parameter	What it does	Turn it up when…
Position	Where the active region sits along the element	the effect should favour one end, or travel
Size	How much of the element the effect covers	you want a wide wash instead of a tight accent
Drive	Energy of the effect’s internal motion	the pattern should feel more agitated or bright
Edge	Soft-to-hard boundary of the shape	you want crisp pixels instead of a gradient
Spin	Rotational or sweeping movement	you want the pattern to orbit or roll

The palette holds up to 8 colours the engine draws from. On RGBW strips it uses the real white channel rather than mixing white from RGB. Order matters, because engines walk the palette in order — reorder the colours and the sequence changes. A few colours read simple and saturated; a full 8 gives you richer gradients.

Motion

Any continuous parameter can run on its own low-frequency oscillator:

• Waveform is the movement shape. Sine breathes gently. Sawtooth sweeps then snaps back (Rev Saw is the same shape mirrored). Triangle goes there and back evenly. There are others.
• Period is seconds per cycle. Tens of seconds reads as slowly evolving ambience; around a second reads as a pulse.
• Depth is how far it swings from your set value. Small keeps a little life around a value; full takes the parameter across its whole range.
• Offset is a phase shift. Give two parameters the same period and different offsets and they move out of step, which is how motion stops looking like a loop.
• Inverted flips the direction.

One thing to know: the sawtooth family (Sawtooth, Rev Saw) wraps on cyclic parameters like Position, rolling over continuously. On a parameter that can’t wrap they clamp at the ends instead. If a Sawtooth on Size looks stuck at the top, that’s the clamp — use Triangle for a continuous there-and-back.

Layering several parameter LFOs at different periods is the biggest single lever for a pattern that never visibly repeats.

Designing live

The Pattern visualizer is clock-locked to the device, and to other devices in a zone, so what you see on screen is what the LEDs do. Design by eye. Controls apply as you move them and the active config saves itself; Files is for named save and restore.

Independent elements & scope

Every element owns its own complete pattern — engine, palette, motion, the lot. There’s no global base to inherit from; an element is simply what it holds. New elements start matching the rest, so editing stays simple until you want variation — uplights breathing slowly while a feature element runs hot, say.

You choose what an edit touches with the scope selector at the top of the Pattern tab:

• Everything (the default) — every element is selected, and edits land on all of them at once, each keeping its own values for anything you don’t touch. The All chip brings you back here.
• One element — click its button to solo it.
• A selection — tap the quill (✎) on elements to add or drop them. The element you’re previewing (the one the editor and visualizer show) is always marked; Match to Element N copies its pattern onto the rest of the selection when you want them identical.

Next: Sensors & reactions.