Weigl and Avolites collaborate in Dollywood
- Details
Weigl designs and manufactures a range of software and hardware products for permanent theme park and interactive experience installations. The story of their collaboration with Avolites starts back in the mid-2000s where Weigl used Avolites’ DMX Pearl and Azure consoles to create single universe ‘single pass’ moving light profiles for their animatronics shows.
Weigl worked closely with Avolites, providing clear and concise feedback without the pressure of a live performance setting.
In June 2019, Wildwood Grove opened with the mesmerizing tree as the centrepiece. The design, built by Life Formations, stands over 50ft tall and is covered with 650 custom RGB LED butterflies, each with pixel mapped wing quadrants. At night, they twinkle and change colour in synchronisation with the music
The initial programming was done on the Avolites Tiger Touch II with an Ai licence, the Synergy mapping was then recorded in a cue list that could be easily set to SMPTE and network MTC timecode and then recorded into Weigl’s own ProCommander AX hardware.
Weigl then used their Showforge software to synchronise the final playback of ArtNet in their hardware, and the audio playback via QSYS. This was the first time they’d used this software on such a large scale, having built it from the ground up for MacOS, and it performed exceptionally. In the end, a single Procommander AX was able to playback all of the show content created in Titan and Synergy.
(Jim Evans)
