Carbon for Unreal includes a convenient auto patch tool for quickly patching a large number of fixtures for situations where a scene has a large number of fixtures, but patch data was not imported from a show file or other source. The Auto Patch tool panel can be opened by clicking the Auto Patch button near the top left of the patch table in the Patch Panel.
The panel displays the number of actively selected fixtures, also the number of non-fixture items currently selected if any (non-fixture items will not affect the auto patch). Auto patch tools will be processed in order of selection.
The Auto Patch panel has three tools for automatically setting up the Patch Data for the selected fixtures in your scene:
- Update Fixture Number
- Update Patch
- Update Name
To use any of these tools select the “Update X” checkbox that corresponds to the desired field to be automatically assigned.
Once a given tool has been selected and its parameters have been setup, click “Apply” to automatically assign the values to the selection of fixture. Additionally, “Auto Close” may be enabled to immediately dismiss the Auto Patch panel once the “Apply” button is pressed.
Fixture #
To automatically assign fixture numbers to the selected fixtures, click the checkbox next to “Update Fixture Number”, then set the first fixture number and the increment value that each additionally selected fixture will be incremented by. (i.e. 3 selected fixtures with a First Fixture # of 100 and an increment value of 10 will set the fixture numbers to 100, 110, and 120 in order of selection).
Patch
To automatically assign fixture numbers to the selected fixtures, click the checkbox next to “Update Patch”. Define the starting patch value for the current selection, the default is 1.1 if left blank. Set the increment to either pull the appropriate number of channels for each fixture automatically from the DMX profile of the fixture (Auto From Mode), or set a manual to define a custom increment number. Select the “Universe Autowrap” checkbox if you wish fixtures to spill into the next universe if there are more fixtures selected than can be patched into the current universe. The Autowrap dropdown defines channel start for fixtures spilling into subsequent universes, (1 by default or a manually specified start channel). If “Universe Autowrap” is not enabled and there are more fixtures than can be patched into the current universe, the remaining fixtures will not be patched.
Actor Name
To automatically update the name of the actor of selected fixtures (as it appears in the Unreal World Outliner), click the checkbox next to “Update Name”. The name is defined with a prefix and a suffix. The default is to use the model of the fixture and the fixture number. If using the Fixture # tool to auto set the fixture number as well, the suffix will pull the new updated fixture number as set by the tool. Both the prefix and suffix values can be manually set to a user desired string.