Show Designer 2

Read the manual sections on how to select fixtures and patch fixtures.

I did, but this is my first programmable controller and I am not sure how to select which lights I want.

Try contacting Elation service, maybe someone there can help over the phone.

The issue I am having is how to assign individual lights to their own channels. I would like to set our house lighting in 4 different zones and be able to dim them by zone.

Depending on how many channels you need per zone, you can make each zone a fixture with that many channels. Use the generic 32 dmx channel fixture or generic dimmer fixture and edit it to the number of channels you need.

That is my whole issue. I do not know how to assign each individual light to a channel.

I need more info then. What are you connecting to? A DMX dimmer pack that runs house lights? How many channels on the pack? How many channels per zone? How many packs per zone? I can probably recommend how to define a SD2 fixture for each zone that you can control. The best scenario would be one DMX channel per zone if your dimmer situation would allow that. Then you could use a single fader to control each zone.

The stage lighting is ran through a Lightronics RD-82 dimmer pack. The house lighting is controlled by a Lightronics 400 cp Architectural lighting panel. Are the addresses for the lights set by these?

yes, you set the address on the light or at least find out what it is, then set the controller to those addresses. Also, you need to find out which dmx channels are controlling the house light zones.

I looked at the Lightronics page and I see the RD82 is an 8 channel dimmer and the CP400 is just a jack panel. The jack is probably connected to a dimmer pack somewhere. When you find out how the dimmers are set up, we can program the controller to match. Hope this helps.

Ok, then I have got to do some wire tracing and see where the dimmer is for the house lights. It is not anywhere that I would have expected to see it, so that probably means it is hidden behind some wall or panel somewhere.

You can try taking your sd2 over to that jack panel, plug in, and try out every dmx channel till you find what works. It might just be the first couple of channels. There should be a power switch somewhere that turns on the system. I would think they would have put all the dimmer racks in the same place.