Alpha — in active development
A room you can put lights in, before you have the room or the lights.
Beam is a real-time 3D sandbox for lighting rigs. Place fixtures where they will really hang, address them to real DMX universes, and watch them respond live to Art-Net from whatever is driving your show. Design a rig, prove the patch and rehearse content without a truck, a truss or a venue.
Windows installer · macOS and Linux from source · GPL v3
What it is
A fast, honest picture of which fixture is doing what, where
What Beam does
- Builds your rig in three dimensions — movers where they'll really hang, bars at the height they'll really sit
- Gives every fixture a real address in a real universe, from a built-in fixture library
- Renders the whole rig live from incoming Art-Net, at whatever frame rate your machine can manage
- Groups fixtures across universes and stores reusable structures for the next show
- Exports fixture definitions and layouts straight into MadMapper
What Beam isn't
- Not photo-realistic. No ray tracing, no measured photometrics, no IES profiles. The haze looks plausible and costs almost nothing.
- Not a lighting desk. Beam doesn't want to replace the thing you already program with. It listens.
- Not finished. This is alpha software. Things move, break and get renamed.
The visualizer
Beams you can actually read
A WebGL 2.0 viewport renders the full rig in three dimensions. Fixtures respond to live channel data — pan, tilt, colour, beam angle, zoom, strobe and colour wheel slots are all emulated in real time.
- Volumetric beam rendering with simulated atmospheric fog and turbulence
- Physically-accurate or simplified light attenuation, whichever your GPU prefers
- In-viewport transform controls — translate, rotate, or snap to discrete steps
- Adjustable global scene illumination, auto-rotate and auto-focus
Patching & structures
Patch it once, keep it forever
Patch fixtures from a built-in library of XML fixture definitions, assign DMX addresses and operating modes, and troubleshoot the patch before it costs you a soundcheck.
- Fixtures from different universes combine into logical groups — the unit of cue programming
- Save any arrangement as a reusable structure and drop it into the next show
- The arranger snaps fixtures into neat lines, arcs and grids in seconds
- Build generic LED fixtures when the library doesn't have your no-name bar
MadMapper integration
Flatten 3D to 2D, and MadMapper just works
Export fixture definitions and layout to files MadMapper imports directly. Patching happens in Beam, once. Complex 3D layouts flatten to 2D through a range of projections — front, back, top, bottom, left, right, cylindrical or spherical unwrap — leaving you with a perfect 2D map ready to pixel-map against.
No re-entering addresses. No guessing which bar is which. No third pass at 2am.
Under the hood
Built on open ground
Beam is a fork of ASLS Studio by Timé Kadel, whose patching, scene, effect and chase engines it still carries. Beam adds Art-Net input, a rebuilt visualizer, generic LED fixtures, per-group export mappings and the MadMapper layout and fixture-library export. It is released under the GPL v3, the licence it inherits. The source lives on GitHub.
Community
Come and break it with us
Beam is alpha and moving fast. The Discord is the quickest way to get help, say what's broken, or argue about where it should go next — and it's where new builds get announced first. Reproducible bugs are best filed on the issue tracker so they don't get lost.