I don't know the actual reason, but today the lighting learning just clicked. As I mentioned previously, the process of creating cues and sequences was pretty obvious, and I'd be comfortable building out a static theatrical show. But I came for the party, and the movement and the effects. The Grand MA3 UI is kinda clunky, and I felt like it was getting in the way. I still think that to a degree, but when I started thinking like an object-oriented programmer (as in code, not lights), things all of a sudden kind of made sense. The platform in the broad sense is all about layering objects and composing them, much in the way you would in Java or C# or whatever.
Where I was hurting was that I couldn't map those concepts to the UI. Well, also, I wasn't satisfied with virtual lights, so now I have six of my own, and that seems to unlock that mapping. What's crazy about it is that it clicked without me looking at the documentation. My laptop was in the other room. I don't know all the things, and I'm still surprised at the sheer number of icons in certain windows (which have no mouse hover to help, which is annoying). But now I can start to think about a look, and how I build it. Transitioning between them I think is straight forward, because I mostly get tracking, which is the process of maintaining state across cues.
Now I just need to figure out how to fog up the room without setting off smoke detectors. I imagine I'll have to figure out some way to do it in my office, because that doesn't get warm enough already in the summer.
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