Synchronization with Unity

Unity
1

Hello! Just learning about LightAct and very excited about its capabilities.

I am hoping to synchronize the timing of DMX lights, prerendered video, and a dynamic Unity application in an exhibit. The lights and video displays would be scored and handled by LightAct, and the Unity application would only need to receive a timecode or some other synchronizing data from LightAct. Is this possible? I have taken a quick look at the LightAct4Unity plugin (https://github.com/visiblegroup/LightAct4Unity) but as many of the Unity resources seem to have been removed from the LightAct website, I wanted to ask here if this kind of integration is possible / still supported before diving into testing. Thanks!

Best,
Scott

2

Hello Scott,

Thank you very much for posting on our Answerhub.

You are right - Unity support is being phased out in order to allow us to focus more on our integration with Unreal Engine. All of the features you mentioned are possible, but only with Unreal, I’m afraid.

If switching to Unreal is still an option, you can download our Unreal Engine sample project, which comes with several features pre-installed:

  • Unreal’s timecode is synced to LightAct’s
  • Unreal is genlocked to LightAct’s framerate

See the videos below for an overview:

I hope this won’t come as too much of a downer :innocent:

cheers,
M

3

Hi Mitja,

Understood, and thanks for the quick response! Unfortunately switching to Unreal isn’t an option in this particular case. I am going to dig into this deeper myself today, but curious for your thoughts – even if this integration is not natively supported, will it still be possible to make LightAct and Unity interoperable using the JSON package / parsing nodes, and the various string parsing nodes? I think I could come up with a custom solution here, as long as there aren’t barriers to this kind of communication.

I do not need to pass any textures or visual information between Unity and LightAct, I just need to pass the timecode into Unity. So, maybe there’s a way to get the timeline time, package it as a text string / JSON, and pass it to Unity?

Would appreciate any tips you’ve got on this – thanks, I appreciate it’s not part of your core functionality.

Thanks,
Scott

4

Hi,

Yes I’m certain this is possible actually. You should use the same method to write data into shared memory as if you are using unreal.

Then you simply read and parse the Json string one unity side.

Thanks,
Mitja

5

That’s great news, thanks! I’ll give it a shot.

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