Pyro Control panel

The Pyro Control panel provides a simple way to add pyro control of individual drones by inserting pyro trigger events at the appropriate pyro channels and frames.

Render

There are three visualization types for pyro effects you can choose dynamically:

None means not to visualize pyro at all
Select Markers to use very simple but quick markers on drones which are supposed to have an active pyro effect at a given frame.
Select Particles to imitate gerbs falling down from the drones for visualization purposes (this option slows down rendering time substantially).

Particles of the pyro effect are assumed to be hosted by the second material slot in the material list of the drone mesh. The name of the material starts with Pyro of … by convention, but this is not enforced — you can rename the material, but you need to keep in mind that Skybrush Studio for Blender will always adjust the second material.

Channel

Multiple pyro channels are supported by our add-on. Channel indexing starts with 1.

To trigger a pyro event on a given channel, simply set the channel to a convenient value before pressing the Trigger button.

Note that only a single event is supported per channel on each drone, so consecutive triggering on the same channel will overwrite previous events.

Payload parameters

There are several payload parameters that can be setup for each pyro trigger event. The following payload parameters can be tuned:

Name: Give a descriptive name for your pyro payloads here. If you export to the VVIZ format of Finale 3D, you can use VDL strings as a naming convention.
Duration: This parameter defines the length of the pyro visualization. It is not affecting the trigger event itself.
Prefire time: Pyro payloads usually need some time after triggering to light up on the sky. Define this duration here and put your trigger events exactly at the desired moments when they should start to be visible. Skybrush will make sure your pyro payloads will be triggered this time earlier to have your spectacles right on time.

Trigger

When you have setup the pyro channel and all your payload parameters, select the drones you wish to add pyro to and move your timeline to the exact frame when you wish to have your pyro effect appear on the sky. Then simply press the Trigger button to add your pyro event.

Already saved pyro events are stored as a JSON string in the Skybrush-specific "Drone Show" section of each drone’s Object Data Properties. The string can be manually edited as well to allow for easy pyro scripting. Alternatively, you can call Python’s bpy.ops.skybrush.trigger_pyro_on_selection() directly to add additional pyro trigger events to selected drones.