Hello- trying to figure out how to manipulate scanner frequencies and properly time/sync oscillators in create mode to get some radial laser banding techniques dialed in liberation. The idea is to see the beam “twisting” versus just a solid beam in rotation…I was fairly decent in achieving the technique with hardware like a radiator but am a bit lost building in liberation. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Phil,
Good question - but it’s a slightly unusual technique in the context of Liberation.
What you’re describing (the beam appearing to twist or show radial banding rather than just forming a solid rotating beam) normally comes from driving the X/Y scanners with continuous sine waves at specific frequencies. Hardware like a Radiator or software like Modulaser makes this easy because you can directly control the scanner frequencies.
Liberation works a bit differently. It’s designed to render arbitrary shapes, so under the hood it is usually starting and stopping paths and moving between frames, which tends to produce clean graphics rather than those analogue scanner effects.
That said, if you want to experiment with something like a single circle / cone beam, you might be able to get close with some tuning.
Warning: the settings below remove some of the safety smoothing in the output pipeline. If you push things too far you could stress or damage scanners, so proceed carefully.
Things to try:
1. Disable some of the smoothing behaviour
In the Laser panel → Advanced settings :
- Turn Smoothing Between Frames OFF
- Turn Shape Sorting OFF
This stops Liberation from trying to “optimise” the drawing order, which can interfere with continuous circular motion.
2. Adjust the scanner preset
Edit your scanner preset and try:
- Acceleration → set very high / maximum
- Hold On Before → 0
- Hold On After → 0
- Hold Off Before → 0
- Hold Off After → 0
This removes the dwell points that are normally inserted for stability.
3. Control the scanner motion
You can then adjust the overall scanner motion using the Speed setting.
From Liberation 1.0.3 onwards, the Point Rate control does not change the physical scanner speed - it only changes the temporal resolution of the output. That means you can increase the point rate to smooth the motion without altering the scanner frequency itself.
That said, if your goal is to really explore scanner frequency interactions (phase offsets, harmonic ratios, etc.), tools that let you directly send sine waves to the X/Y axes will usually be much easier to work with.
For example, for the Tom Scott laser video I actually wrote a custom app to drive the scanners directly for that kind of effect.
So Liberation might get you part of the way there, but it’s not really designed specifically for scanner-frequency experiments. Still, it can be fun to play with and you may discover some interesting effects.
Hope that helps!
Seb