Imran Shakoor: Project 4 Final Project

 Concept: To bring a virtual object out of a wall into real life using projection mapping. I used skating because it has been a hobby of mine and a way of transportation for me for a long time. 

Technique: The part that took the longest to create was the actual animation which took a lot longer than I thought it would take, and as I've come to realize these things usually do. I created a Half Pipe ramp in blender and a cartoony looking skateboard. I first created a realistic looking one but was having problems with animation speeds for some reason so I stuck with the cartoony theme. I proceeded to animate the scene so the skateboard would loop from on side to the other and do a trick in the air once it reached the front. I wanted to have multiple iterations where it would do a different trick each time, but animating that one trick and to get it smoothly proved very time consuming in of itself. Once that was done, I rendered out a version making sure the camera was placed in such a way where the board in the air doing the trick would be the focal point and so it would like it was popping out at the viewer. In order to accentuate the illusion, I had to export the animation with an alpha channel background so whatever the animation was being projected onto, that would become the background. On top of that, I sent the video to after effects and added a fisheye lens to make it pop more, and then a time warp affect so the skateboard would appear in slow motion when it does the trick. Once that was all done, I put the video into in madmapper. I purposefully made the ramp in the animation green and somewhat translucent for two reasons. The first is that the viewer could see the board skating from one side to the other, and the second reason was for a virtual matrix type of aesthetic. When I was ready to projection map it on a wall I wanted the bottom of the ramp to be in contact with an actual floor so the the projection wouldn't just look like a floating screen of this cut-off ramp. I used a Panasonic DLP projector from the 3D Lab because I wanted to project it massively on a wall, unfortunately the first wall I found was in a too brightly lit area (it also was not as big as I had imagined it being). I was able to find a dark area in the ATEC building, and although their was not enough space to project a large image, I made a way and improvised and ended up with something I thought was cooler. The image was sheared but still connected to the floor, so the animation worked. From the beginning of the project I had this idea of a portal opening up, so I used the arc material in madmapper, created a mask around it, and placed it on top of the animation. I created a second cue where the portal opens up to reveal the full animation. By default the arc material has a sound edit so that was perfect to enhance the alive effect I was going for. 

The first wall.

The animation.

Interpretation: I wanted the projection to just be on the wall and people could walk by. In the video I have it in a narrative way such that a skater it walking by and sees this portal in the wall. He can see enough to know that their is some skating business going on inside the portal and wants to join in. He talks to his friend (or himself in this case lol) and decides to jump in, first asking permission because he notices the arc "hearing" him talking. Eventually the arc opens up to allow him in (or the animation out).