Sub-fixture sequence and grouping

[AinarsP]

Hi,

not entirely sure this is GDTF or console (MA3) related issue, but hopefully someone can help:

I'm building a GDTF file for LED fixture with multiple individually controllable pixels. It contains "effect" part that controls effect generator and "pixels" that are for individual RGBW pixel control.
Effect part has RGBW color channels, dimmer channel and effect control channels.
Pixels are RGBW using virtual dimmer.

Actual fixture output is sum of these two independent parts, but I'm simplifying the visualization so only Pixels will get output. (and visualisation is not the concern here)

I've built fixture using two types of "Beam" Geometries - Pixels referenced multiple times (with DMX Address Offsets for each) and one representing Effect part.
The sequence these Geometries are created will end up being the sequence these parts show up on MA3 console. (BTW - GDTF editor has no way of modifying this sequence, I have to do some drag-n-drop trickery to change sequence or do that in MA3 fixture editor).

If first of these Geometries is the "pixels" , in MA3 I get a fixture that has empty "parent" part and children for each pixel and last child representing Effect control. Everything works as expected.

But I would like to have the Effect sub-fixture to be the 1st child (so it gets ID .1) and pixels to follow (with IDs starting from .2).
If I swap those geometries so Effect is before Pixels what I get is the Parent fixture now has all the Effect control channels and only Pixels are sub-fixtures. Problem with this is that if i Select the parent to edit Dimmer or RGBW values, Pixel parameters get edited as well.
Besides this, Effect dimmer is now affecting Pixel intensity dimmer readout everywhere in console and acts as a master while actual output is fine (I'm guessing MA3 bug).

What I need is to force all Geometries to be children of the fixture and fixture top level to be empty. Is there a way to achieve this? 
If I understand correctly - GDTF has no means of doing this and the way Geometries are mapped to fixture sub-parts is purely on MA3 side.

Edited July 31, 2023 by AinarsP

[Petr Vanek - Robe]

The gMA3 method to create sub-fixtures is depending on their implementation and is unrelated to GDTF. The logistics are quite complex and they try hard to get it right for many various scenarios. You need to experiment with this, sometimes you can add an empty geometry into the tree and it helps. Try to get their support in case you need more advice.

[vvasicek]

Hello, from my understanding (but I could be wrong) for the MA console is critical if the geometry is linked to a DMX channel or not and I am not sure 100%, but when I was trying to do some magic with it I think dimmers played some role in it too, but as Peter said it would be better to reach MA support to get better understanding.

Vlastimil