scenic.tools Schéma
Schéma is an extensible multi purpose visual scripting toolkit implemented in VL.
It’s aimed at atmosphere control. It can be your lighting desk, VJ tool, pixel driver or soon a synth, a laser driver or whatever you can think of as it aims to fully leverage the powers of vvvv and VL and be open and expandable.
The basic workflow has 3 key steps:
Create a fixture layout in the Schematic view
Add blocks to each fixture, creating Block Stacks that define its behavior
Play around and explore the possibilities
Schéma aims to streamline visual programming. Achieve greater visual clarity and increase productivity and fun of use compared to other tools.
To achieve this, both links (lines connecting outputs to inputs) and layout of each Block Stack are implicitly assumed from the structure of your program. There's no need to fish for pins or take extra care to keep your programs tidy. This also opens up the possibility to use less precise input such as touch or game controllers and to do adjustments quickly enough to support live coding performances.
Of course, this is a trade-off, as the theoretical expressivity of such programs is reduced. For instance with these limitations, multiple blocks can never share one source. However, by being able to reference other Fixtures, Layers and global variables, you will find that there are plenty of tools at your disposal to deal with such situations.
And when your vision exhausts the capabilities of Schéma, you can always go one level deeper and implement new Blocks in the powerful VL visual programming language, which plugs seamlessly into the .NET ecosystem. Or maybe just use Schéma part of your toolchain, it speaks OSC.
In any case, the inherent simplicity of Schéma's programming should be a great fit for beginners wrapping their heads around dataflow principles. And once the program is fully open source, increasingly skilled users might find themselves dipping their toes into its VL codebase.
Continue onto Getting Started
Check the Roadmap to see what's coming
This documentation, just as the software it's describing, is a work in progress with some parts changing rapidly.
As such, these pages don't cover everything the software has to offer while at the same time you may find concept pages describing features yet to be implemented or released.
Also note that the used terminology is not final and may change.
With that said, I still believe this document will offer a useful introduction and deeper insight into the core concepts of Schéma.
