Let’s take a quick tour of the applications of the Aximmetry software package. We’ll enter them only for a few moments since each of them has its own set of detailed tutorials.
Our central application is the Composer. It’s capable of both creating graphics content, playing them, and also controlling them in real-time during a show. Its core element is a node-based editor interface that gives exceptional freedom for assembling video processing lines and effects for building and animating 3D scenes. In addition, we can create so-called Control Boards that are simplified interfaces for commanding the graphics scenes during a live show.
Pilot is the little brother of Composer. If we open a scene in it we’ll only see the Control Boards, but won’t see the node editor. In other words, it’s a simplified application that only serves the controlling of a live show.
The next bigger application is the Performer. It’s specialized for performing live on-stage shows by VJs / Visual Artists, where the demand is to quickly change between a lot of visual content and effect them at will, usually as an accompaniment for a musical or theatrical piece. Here we can start various preloaded videos and generated visual content assembled in Composer, and we can adjust their various parameters in real-time. Of course, we can load 3D contents here as well. The content can be modulated by effects that are also assembled in Composer. The content can be blended and faded between each other in numerous ways.
In Tools, we can find the already known Installer that we can install Content Packages with. The simplest way to use it is to double-click on a package file that automatically starts the Installer and loads the package.
The next tool is the Packager. It’s the tool for creating our own content packages to be shared with others. We can add arbitrary content files to it, the dependency files are automatically added. Then we can pack all of them together with a single click.
With our Dependency Manager, we can handle the referred files of our contents. They can be moved, replaced, renamed, and so on. This functionality is also found within Composer, where we can perform these operations on the currently open compound. The difference is that in this external Dependency Manager application we can load multiple content files at once and can handle their dependencies together.
Our last group is the Network applications. These are used when we run Aximmetry in a multi-machine configuration. In this case, there is a central controlling machine that itself can render as well, and at the same time, it can control several satellite machines. They can render completely different content or different views of the same content. For example, in a virtual studio system, each machine renders the view of a particular camera, or in a panorama view, each machine renders a slice of the image, and so on.
The application that runs on the satellite machines is called Renderer. It’s the one that receives the rendering commands from the central machine. But we can’t start this application directly. We have to start the Launcher instead. Its only task is to start, kill or restart the Renderer upon the command of the central machine. This separation serves the safety of the system. If something happens with the Renderer, it freezes or crashes, we can handle the situation remotely through the Launcher.
So we can’t start Renderer directly, but there’s a configuration app for it. We can set up the inputs and outputs of the Renderer and can save it. After that whenever Launcher starts Renderer it will run with the configuration we set up.
This concludes our quick tour. Detailed tutorials are available for each of these applications.
