Kuo-Wei Lee Project 4: Relief Mapping (Week 9-12)

Social Mask

Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successfull personality and duplicate it.” ― Bruce Lee

Concept:

There is something about wearing a mask that changes you. Because you are more anonymous, you feel a certain sense of freedom. You can express hidden aspects of your personality without fear.

Masking is a process in which an individual changes or "masks" their natural personality to conform to social pressures, abuse, and/or harassment. Some examples of masking are a single overly dominant temperament, or humor, two incongruent temperaments, or displaying three of the four main temperaments within the same individual. Masking can be strongly influenced by environmental factors such as authoritarian parents, rejection, and emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. An individual may not even know he or she is wearing a mask because it is a behavior that can take many forms.

Wearing a mask protects people from vulnerability. I fear that if I stand tall and exposed, I’ll be “weak” in some way. But when you wear a mask you stand in resistance to your true life and end up attracting realities that conflict with who you really are.

So, Take off your mask!

Process:

Special Scan - Capture the real size and ratio into madmapper as a reference to help us for next step: Calibration 

note: Camera's iso setting should not be too high or it would catch so much noise to affect the quality of image.

Test 01: 1/40, 5.6, iso 1600                                    Test 02: 1/15, 5.6, iso 400

Special Scan

Align & Calibration - Import UV file(.obj) to madmapper and roughly position / align it to the model of backdrop image. Then align the 3D file to the real model or the picture which I just special scanned, the calibration process will need at least 6 alignment point to perform this operation. The last but not least, refine the tweaks by moving extra alignment points.

UV file

Calibration

Generate Content - The 3D surface layer in madmapper we just created is very powerful to control lighting resource, add vector lines layer, and put texture materials on it etc.

Here's the Social Mask:

Social Mask

Social Mask in Mad. White point is lighting resource

Social Mask

Another Relief practice:

Relief Mapping Practice

Relief Mapping Practice

Relief Mapping Practice with Marvel Studio Opening

Falak Jamma - Project 3: Classroom Mapping (Updated Video Link)

Concept: 

I've had the idea of traveling within the inner eyes weeks before we were presented this particular project and I toyed with it a bit until I was content. After that I thought "How could I make this a consistent theme throughout the room?" And upon further thought I came up with the concept of having exaggerated human anatomy throughout the room as my composition, and I knew just how I could make it work.

Process: 

I wanted to use 3D in order to activate a majority of the anatomy in the room, so I set out and found many 3D models of human organs and bodies. If they were not already obj files, I would bring them into Maya and convert them. With these obj files I could bring them into After Effects with a Plug in called Element 3D which allows me to texture animated the objects and render them quickly while composting other effects behind it.

There were also many instances that I needed to apply soft edges to my rendered assets in Madmapper in order to keep them seamless between two projects.

Interpretation:

I loved the way It turned out, Rendering this many 3D assets took a lot of time, but it was worth it at the end of the day.

Project 3 Room Mapping : Travis Fowler & Morgan Grasham

Transitions is a room mapping installation with a narrative told through the combination of constructed audio and visuals. The piece follows an unnamed protagonist through death and imagines his afterlife. He begins in the city, driving a car and switching between radio stations when he gets into an accident and crashes. His death is implied through the sound of slowing heart beats and a transition to white as he goes into the light. He is transported to a natural space, where he reflects and interprets his life experiences through nature. After this meditation, he is transported again to the quiet infinity of deepest space.

Credits:
City footage
forest footage

Maritza Soriano Project 03: Classroom Mapping

Concept 
When it comes for coming up with themes for projects, I tend to figure out what music I want to use, and then base my visual off of that. Childish Gambino's "I.Flight of the Navigator" from his album "Because of the Internet" is one of my all time favorite songs, there's something so ethereal and calming about it. That song is an experience every time I listen to it. I had a dream where I had woken up and realized I was dreaming, tries to wake myself up, experienced sleep paralysis, and I had to just wait and look at the night sky in my dream until I could wake myself up. Flight of the Navigator makes me think of that visual for some reason. I also decided early on that I wanted my theme to be centered around Gambino's albums/music videos in some way, shape, or form.

Process
Hoo boy, this one was a doozy for sure! I spent a good amount of time in Illustrator. I really wanted to make this my own and try my hand at illustrating a majority of my project. The first thing I illustrated was inspired by Gambino's "Kauai" EP, This also inspired the other theme, nature and the different times of day.

After settling on the final color palettes for the illustrations, I exported certain elements separately in order to create subtle animated elements to these illustrations. I felt the last design needed a little more "oomph", so i made the sky transparent and took this stock footage of a meteor shower to give it that extra something. 

Interpretation 
This project was definitely demanding, but also gave the most creative leeway. However I think the opportunity to wash an entire room with projections that are your own is rewarding. Its also an interesting way to incorporate storytelling with your own media.

Paulina Mejia - Classroom Mapping

In my work I am interested in the language evolving from Internet culture as well as the aesthetics that take part in it. However idiotic memes seemingly are they circle around several Internet users and evolve into messages that reflect the current trend of nihilistic humor in everyday life, but is ironically accompanied with feel-good images of early 2000's nostalgia. In this work I aimed to capture this environment.


While entering the room I wanted the viewer to enter an atmosphere that is initially soothing, or fun. In the background 'Africa' by Toto is playing as it is an iconic 80's song that creates nostalgia in present days. The entire room is a girlish pink and purple with several viral videos of dancing and cats, both sides of the room include a fantasy galaxy view. At first glance I wanted the viewer to laugh. This imagery is heavily related to the Vaporwave aesthetic which has helped establish the nihilistic humor previously mentioned.

Upon closer inspection there are bodies of text acquired from several social media accounts scattered around which include the messages, "Me reassuring myself: it's really ok you dumb bitch", "my personality issues can be directly traced to the fact that I couldn't do the monkey bars as a child", "When you die your voice gets added to the Big Bang Theory laugh track" and "'It's like we finish each other's'... 'government conspiracy theories'". With the discovery of these messages the environment of the room is no longer a silly pink thing but contains an underlying tension expressed by a generation of Internet user attempting to normalize this discontent with a humorous cover up of a non-aggressive aesthetic. The result creates a very unique juxtaposition of aesthetic intention and underlying messages.

I took advantage of the massive size of the room to engulf the viewer with a feeling. To create a hidden tension I used smaller areas of the room for the viewer to find these nihilistic jokes.

Jere Baker - Environment Map

Concept:
I wanted to create something that interacted with the geometry and objects in the room. I like bright colors, and wanted to have something that was unified and able to be run with or without a background track.

Process:
I began by mapping each of the projectors, including as much detail as I could in the form of quads. This took an eternity. I mapped out all of the pipes, ceiling, walls, cabinets, projectors, unnecessary  shadows, etc. for each of the setups.

layering

Once I had completed creating all the quads for each setup, I exported the output to vector so that I could manipulate the geometry in after effects. I pulled the raw vectors into illustrator put each quad on its own layer so that AE could read them as separate objects. 

I imported the illustrator file into AE (as composition - retain layer sizes; makes it easier to manipulate later) and began messing with one layer to see what kind of things I could do. I was able to come up with a couple effects that randomized the color of the layer and rotated through different colors at a good pace. I copied this effect tree to all of the other objects. Because the effects were randomized individually, each layer was a different color at a different time. 

After figuring out the main code, it was just a matter of applying it to all of the layers (excluding the masking layers, which were left black). After I had exported the final animations, I brought them back into MM and had do some some small adjustments to match them up perfectly with the original quads. I also had the animations bounce so there wouldn't be a seam and they could loop infinitely independent of one another. 

persp1

persp2

James Hoggatt: Projection 3 – Classroom Mapping

Concept
     This concept is expanding upon one of my looks from the last project. I wanted to show texture and scenery from far west Texas. I recently took a trip to Marfa and collected dozens of videos from inside galleries and all over the town. mainly looking for textures on walls, trains, and fences. to give you a feel of what its like to walk around there. I also went to Big Bend national park where I got footage of some of the most beautiful sunsets and mountains that I have ever seen. Originally I was going to make a look showing the contrast between footage of people working on making phones and electronics on one side of the room and on the other side of the room commercials for those products. I decided it was a bit too dark for the energy of the room.

Process
     I wanted to use several of the features of the room to accent my composition including the tape maps and geometry of the cabinets. I made sure to mask out all areas where two projectors were hitting and edge blend all the projectors together. Then went through and selected as many of the videos that looked good and fit with each other. distorting there color and speed to make things cohesive.

     In this video you can see that I have used video from a sandstone found there mixed with footage from out the window of the car and several of these videos have been mixed together on the tape design on the right. I used hints of pink and yellow to make the natural orange coloring of the land pop.

Final Product

Tunnel

     Credit to David for showing me the video that I got this idea from watching. I wanted to make it feel like the whole room was moving through a large tunnel. To do this I was going to need to make the tunnel in Blender and morph it around as it moves over the cameras. I made one small section of tunnel and used a modifier to duplicate it a couple dozen times. I then applied a path modifier so that I could animate said path. bending the tunnel on both sides of the cameras. Then I add three cameras two perspective cameras for the front and back so the tunnel gets smaller the further away it is. One orthographic so that the video I use on the 6 projectors pointed at the side of the room flow into each other without the distortion of perspective. The results were very effective and made for a very active look.

This is what the setup in Blender looks like. Notice that there are three cameras in the center and that the path next to the tunnel has two points with crosses as handles so that I could animate them.

Orthographic side view

Perspective front view

Perspective back view

And when its all set up in Mad Mapper and projected it looks like this.