Melanie Estes: Week 4 Background Mapping Proposal

The Natural Science and Engineering Research Lab at the north edge of campus is most commonly referred to as the Mermaid Building due to the iridescent blue, purple, and green scales along several of its outside walls. I took my background image from an outside staircase off the back side of the building just south to it. I then edited my image in Photoshop to look more like it was taken at dusk, rather than the late afternoon. I chose this building because it already has an ocean/underwater theme, and the architecture is unique to provide opportunities for different areas of projection.

I used quads to map out the flat areas I wanted to use, such as the scaled walls that make up the tallest part of the building and the brick wall coming up from the ground on the right side of the image. I also drew lines across the major seams for the windows that make up the curved part of the building, as well as along the wide metal strips between the windows of the tower part of the building. I then used two quads with masks to map out the sidewalk going up to the entrance. I finally mapped the metal mesh that runs along the top of the curved part of the building.
In the first preset, I wanted to stick heavily to an underwater theme. For all of the scaled walls, I used the clouds material on a low opacity and multiply blend setting to look like the shadows caused on an underwater surface where the light reflects differently through small waves. For the window frame on the left near the middle, I used two sets of quads. One has the material Noisy Barcode, and the other is a circular Color Gradient of purples and blues. The horizontal lines on the wall of windows are both animated and textured with the given Color Pattern, and moved along the media to focus on the coordinating colors for the overall theme. For the vertical lines, I used the Siren material rather than a line animation. The other flat areas use short video clips found on the royalty free sites https://pixabay.com/ and https://www.motionelements.com/. The mermaid silhouette comes from an image also found on Pixabay. The videos are of fish, jellyfish, moving water, and the edge of a stream that I placed on the sidewalk.
In the second preset, I stayed with a water theme but changed what effects were being used. I decided to use a video of swaying coral on all of the scaled surfaces. I changed the set of five parallel quads at ground level to be an image of melting ice that is spread across them. The wall on the right the comes up form the ground was changed to a color gradient to better balance the similar effect on the widow frame on the left side. I also changed the lines and removed the animation from the horizontal lines across the wall of windows, replacing it with a Siren material. I changed the lines on the tower to be textured with a Square Array.

Seeing as this project is the first project where I have used MadMapper, everything was a new experiment. I found that, if I want to animate a line, I can copy and paste the lines and keep the one underneath as an non-animated constant so that something is always showing on that part of the building. I also copy and pasted several of the quads if I wanted to layer the effects, such as including the silhouette of the mermaid on top of the Clouds material. I had trouble masking around the tree because leaves lead to a semi-transparent surface, and it looks off if there is no light shining through. I was unable to figure out if it is possible to mask a line, so instead I edited my original background image in Photoshop to get a .png of just the tree that I could add to a quad and layer on top of the lines. I also enjoyed syncing the animation of the lines to move together. If done again, I would like to try mapping the wall of windows in a mosaic pattern. I would also like to try complimenting the water theme of the building, rather than copy it, by projecting something with a different element's theme such as ice or air.