Make lighting consoles and speakers do way cooler stuff.
Alva Sorcerer is a Blender add-on that uses OSC and animation to remote-control existing lighting, video, & audio consoles.
Sorcerer unlocks the following 7 innovations for theatrical light design and live 3D sound:
Additional innovations coming soon in Version 2:
Alva Sorcerer is an External Multi-disciplinary Animation Renderer, or EMAR.
To learn more about exactly how these features work, what they can do, what they can't do, consider reviewing our ADHD-friendly documentation.
Anyone who uses ETC Eos family lighting consoles, especially timecode.
Great for community theaters and high schools due to simplified controls.
Anyone with a 3D sound system.
Timecoding on ETC Eos way easier now.
Can now make moving lights track 3D audio objects.
Much simpler way of using professional lighting consoles for people who are less technical.
Not DMX software itself.
Not visualization software.
Does not connect directly to 3D audio speaker systems—remote controls Qlab instead.
Instead of one ML editor, have one for each group.
Instead of using computer syntax to do fans, you can just poke these whenever you want.
This part will be free of charge and fully open-sourced.
When you're done, just have the orb turn it into a qmeo for local playback.
Visually organize the steps of lighting dance routines.
You don't need to build this yourself, it's already there.
Make it seem like a moving light is a massive lightsaber slicing through the house.
Use 3D shapes to make cool stuff happen.
You don't have to use ETC Eos for many of the features.
3D animation in real life, for theatre, with Blender.
The entire heart of Sorcerer's codebase has been rewritten from scratch to vastly improve reliability and versatility.
The entire patch system has been rewritten with a brand new UI that allows you to start doing art faster, focusing on the technicals far less.
Motor nodes, brushes, scene-level modifiers (brightness/contrast, saturation, hue, and rudimentary curves), much more powerful mixer nodes, a video-switcher-style cue controller, set piece lighting controls built into set pieces, much improved pan/tilt constraints through Blender, much improved flash strip choreography, and many more
ChatGPT 4 does the work of a part-time software developer employee for Alva Theaters. It doesn't get paid $15 an hour, $15 a day, or $15 a week. Its invaluable services are provided at a rate of $15 a month. Without OpenAI's services, it could have taken years to develop Sorcerer.
Sorcerer first started out with the goal to develop a standalone Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with ~$20,000 over the course of 5-10 years. Developing a video editor, 3D engine, and node system from scratch would have been a mammoth undertaking for a company this small. Instead, by taking a piggyback ride on the engineering masterpiece that is Blender, Sorcerer was taken from idea to market in a matter of months.
Special thanks to the owner of a profile on blenderartists.org who contributed critical code in the early weeks of the Sorcerer project. Their contributions got the project on its feet.