Live Design Projection Master Class

About 10 days ago I registered for the Projection Master Class in Orlando on October 26th and 27th. This is the day before my thesis defense on Friday Oct. 28th. This is probably ill-advised but the fact the class is only in Orlando compared to Las Vegas last year, I think I will take my chances. Not to mention, a large portion of the class will focus specifically on projection mapping, my thesis. I'm sure we will learn about all these programs that allow you to wrap projections, etc, which will in turn make me question everything I've done on my thesis. Thankfully, the resources that I have are limited so I can't feel too bad. It's like I'm doing projection mapping on a shoestring.

I'm excited about all the techniques and software I will be exposed to at this conference, but mostly I am looking forward to meeting people who are actually working in the industry. The world of projection design is small and in my research I have come across works by all the presenters: Mode Studios, Vello Virkhaus, Jake Pinholster (a UF Grad). I feel this opportunity is invaluable to my career and I will just have to be extra prudent to get everything completed in time.

Polygon Mapper Test

This is a simulation of projecting onto non-rectilinear surfaces (in this case just a box). The actor has the ability to control 6 vertices with edit dots that range in size from 5x5 pixels to one pixel allowing for more precise mapping. The control panel also controls intensity, translation of video in map, rotation and scaling.

Here is a picture of the 2nd version of the control panel for mapping 6 vertices of a polygon. Each of the 6 Vertex Boxes are set to the exact resolution of the stage, in this case 640 x 480. The user also has the ability to change the intensity, pan, zoom, and spin as well as change the video itself. The layers, stages, transparency, and dot edit size are controlled from the control panel also.

Actor Update

Several advances were made on the actor this week. Working with Angelos, I was able to change the size of the editing dots. Now the dots can be adjusted from 1 px to 5x5 px dots. The edit mode can also be turned on and off. In future iterations, the edit mode on/off will be eliminated and the dot size will range from 0 to 5, which will streamline the actor and the number of steps needed. We were also able to fix the issue with the 6the vertex not responding. It was just a simple fix. While trying to fix the problem we discovered how to make the actor work in reverse and occlude the polygon instead of fill it. I am hoping this will be useful when working on the freak show cages in the Last Unicorn. I will create a second actor specifically for that. Still throwing around ideas for the name of it. I did change the name of the current actor from 'polygon cutter' to 'polygon mapper' which is more descriptive of its actions.

We are still working on dynamically changing the inputs for vertices and anti-aliasing. I am also working on a control panel that allows translation of the vertices in 2D with both x & y together instead of independent movement. So far, so good.

Polygon Cutter Updates

Updates were made on code to allow for real time adjusting of the x and y coordinates. To illustrate how effective the adjustments are, I have uploaded a video of a wave generator set to constantly change the y-axis of one of the vertices.

Red Dots were added at all vertices to show when the actor is in edit mode (too small to see in this video).

For the next iteration, anti-aliasing will be incorporated into the code, along with the ability to turn on and off the red edit dots, also the dots will be made larger.

Amon Tobin 'ISAM' Live : Mutek Premiere

MadMapper

MadMapper public debut at the MadMapper Festival May 19 - 29, 2011.

Movie Plays with current plugin iteration

After upgrading to the newest version 1.3 of 17 released May 20, 2010, our current "polygon cutter" has the ability to play movies files as the polygon.

Also, Isadora released a data array actor that will be investigated as a method to load vertices.