Tape Mapping: Leslie McCrackem

Tape Mapping project

I choose a trumpet for the project. I did not design the trumpet Paul Hinerliter who is in my same class design it.

 First the trumpet picture was a jpg file that was placed in to madmapper. Then I traced over the lines of the trumpet using the line tool and also resized the lines to make them not so blocky. Changes the color of the lines to make them a soft shade of yellow to give a more classical trumpet feel. After tracing the lines on the trumpet, change the color , and the size I make the lines move within the trumpet.

The next thing was I added cats that where playing a trumpet and Trumbo inside the center of the taped out trumpet. I placed a mask around the cats so that cat would not leave within the trumpet space. By the head of the trumpet I added dancing cats to fill up the empty space.

For the background of the trumpet, I used a brick wall that fades in and out. Changing the color to red instead of leaving it black and white. The brick wall is the main background. It goes behind the trumpet only. Above the trumpet and below are spot lights that are colored a shade of red. I made so that the spot light would come from opposite sides.

above the spot light layer that is above the trumpet I add two marching band gif. the band is marching above the cabins that give the illusion that they are walking on a ground.  

Tape-Mapping, Rattled by John Rose

Rattled is a tape mapping project featuring repetition and juxtaposition.

I wanted to do something spooky for the Halloween season, which led me to the idea of a skull. But I felt a generic human skull wouldn't be as interesting (or as creepy) as some of the other options out there. This led me to the dog skull, which I always thought of as a very interesting shape, and lends itself well to an angular, polygonal rendering.

I palled around Google for a while, and found this image:

I took that into Illustrator, and went over it with the trace feature which gave me a scalable vector image, which I then cleaned up and edited down until I had this line set:


I exported these lines as a .SVG file, and popped it open in MadMapper. Once there, I began playing around with placement and orientation. At the urging of Prof. Scott, I iterated the design to take advantage of as much of the space I was projecting on as I could.

When taping off the image, I tried to slightly exaggerate the angular, nature of the lines, especially with the rightmost skull, which I reversed and had a mind to juxtapose against the other two, making it look rougher and more sketchy.

After that, I started playing around with effects and colors.

I animated the lines of the two blue skulls on the left in the same exact manner, giving them a stable, unified look. I also masked them off and put a spinning particle cloud behind them, orbiting around them in a tight swarm. The red skull on the right got a vibration animation to make it look erratic and disturbed. I also put a pair of green particle clouds in the red skull's eyes to give it a haunted, possessed feel.

Screen Capture Video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IC1jeaNbhqmiwaVQm40hntuOD_Sv22IY

Not quite satisfied with it just sitting there, I decided to figure out how to get the design to react to sound. First, I linked the red skull's vibration animation to sound, making it fly farther and farther apart the louder the sound. I also added a pair of lines representing laser-eyes from the red skull and set their default thickness to 0 before setting it to increase with sound. I tried to make the vibration react to higher pitches, while the laser eyes react to bass sounds, but the results were mixed. I then went to the blue skulls and recycled the mask over the particle swarm and inverted it on an animated stripes quad. Again, I set the default thickness and speed of these lines to 0 and used identical settings from the laser eyes for their own audio trigger so that they would appear at the same time and with the same intensity as the lasers. I colored them red and oriented them to travel laterally down the skulls so as to evoke damage and impact animations from old video game sprites.

Projection Video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lHB5xhzhJOQfpHAOhvH1q3aeULDIFIBJ

The piece's meaning kind-of evolved as I was working on it, but I ended up settling on a theme of unstable radicalism against controlled unity. The red skull is crazed, individualistic, and violent, while the blue skulls are unified, conformist, and judgemental. Both tho, are ghoulish, inhuman, and dead.

MadMapper File: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1S20xCN-97tztGxHAKs4aSYDMJjeS0JWU

David Rake - Mandelbulb3D Tutorial

Mandelbulb3D

Mandelbulb3D is a software I've learned in the past month to create 3D (can be used for 2D) environments for interesting visuals. It is a free program that does not require installation. It requires no modeling, texturing, or lighting experience. All the visuals are created based on mathematical formulas. A knowledge of math is not needed as many formulas are built into the program already. Tinkering with settings is how you can thrive with this program. Some of my favorite environments happen in 5 min of messing around and others come from hours of work. The environments grow as you travel deeper into them so they seemingly continue on forever.

This program is excellent for creating Stills and Animations. I will cover how to do both in their basic form in this tutorial. 

Download Link - http://www.mandelbulb.com/2014/mandelbulb-3d-mb3d-fractal-rendering-software/

Interface

The Calculate 3D button needs to be pressed after you make any changes in order to see the changes.

Just above the Calculate 3D button is a back arrow which is the Undo. Sometimes it is unreliable so make sure you save often. Save through the Save Tab at the top and click the m3i button.

The Formulas Tab will open a separate window. This is where you will do most of your tinkering to create an environment.

In the second row from the top you have Formula 1, Fo.2, etc these are the slots where you will add Formulas. Having the amount of 2-3 Formulas seems like the best way to get interesting results without having too much difficulty. 

The 3rd row has many tabs where you will select your Formulas. I generally use a combination of at least one 3D/3Da and one Ads to start out. Think of 3D/3Da as a background and Ads as effects. My favorite formulas are _AmazingBoxSSE2 and SierpHilbert both from 3Da (I will be using the formulas listed above in respective order in the Formulas tabs in the next steps if you wish to follow along).

At the bottom there is a section for Max. Iterations. If this is increased it increases the quality on the image. It keeps imperfections that may be deleted in otherwise.

Remember after making any Formula changes to click Calculate 3D to see them.

Still Image Render

Once you have an environment Select the Calculation Tab.

At the top this is where you adjust your Resolution. I suggest setting your resolution then using the scale button to scale it up once to ensure the highest quality when it is scaled back down. Click Calculate 3D after.

On the right in the Calculation Tab there are two sections that are needed to effect quality. Raystep multiplier needs to be reduced to avoid downscaling (0.1 - 0.05 any lower and the time required to render increases exponentially for little return). This option also reduces noise which is sometimes desired (This is where increasing Max Interations would help to retain noise but increase quality). Smooth normals decreases the roughness of the environment and smooths (2-8 and higher rendering time increases drastically).

The Calculate 3D button will Render out your image with the higher quality settings. This generally takes 5 - 20 minutes depending on the settings. After select the Save pic Tab at the top to Save.

Animation

Set your preferred Resolution for the final animation and downscale it using the arrows to the right. We will scale it back up when we begin to render.

Calculate 3D to apply the Resolution.

Click the Animations Tab in the top left corner.

Click the Page icon in the bottom left. This ensures we are working on a new animation. Keep this window open to the side.

At the Main Screen click Navigator in the top left.

This window is the Navigator. This is how you traverse the environment.

The Parameter button on the right resets the Navigator View to what is currently on the Main Screen.

The big box is contains all the keys you will use to traverse the environment. E (Up) Q/C (Down) A D control Sliding or Panning. W S control Zoom or how you will move forward and backwards. Zoom doesn't always work correctly to keep an eye on the Zoom counter in the top left of the box. Sometimes it zooms out when you are trying to zoom in. J I K L control where the camera is Looking. U O control the Rotation of the camera.

To start Animation click Ani keyfr. Which sends a Key-Frame to the Animation window. It is helpful to have the Animation window open to ensure it received the new Key-Frame which will be shown at the top where the white boxes are. The program will render the Frames in-between the Key-Frames automatically.

Additionally the button above Ani keyfr. is View to main. This will take whatever you have in your Navigator screen and send it to the Main Screen. This allows you to render the new image but it also changes where you reset to when you click Parameter in the Navigator.

Sections like this where it looks like the camera is partially inside something effects the Navigator. As soon as you move, it will teleport the camera elsewhere.

SAVE BEFORE YOU BEGIN RENDERING YOUR ANIMATION. ONCE YOU START THERE IS NO RESTART OR STOP OPTION.

Once you have your key-frames set, return to the Animation window. I suggest using Render preview. It takes a couple of minutes but will give a rough estimate of how your animation will look. This helps especially for timing speed with frames when Zoom is uncooperative. Also you can save this preview as a .gif file.

The Processings button is almost the same as the Calculation Tab on the Main Screen. Be careful about turning the settings very high because it can quickly increase total render time since you may be Rendering thousands of images. Below the Processings button you can set your Resolution to a higher size if you wish.

Create a Folder wherever desired and set that as your Output folder. It will send the individual images to that folder which can be put together later in Adobe Premiere or other video editing programs.

To start Rendering click Start rendering animation images. It will tell you which Frame you are currently Rendering out of how many total to the right of that button. To the left of the button it says "last", after the first Frame has Rendered change "last" to the total number of Frames. This prevents it from continuing on past your animation Frames and Rendering white screens.

John Rose Assignment 1, Back-plate Mapping

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1cT1sPxqhnqXJ6DPy1_h12UlfgZ-Tx2-W

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.

Joseph Wintermote: Project 1 Backdrop Mapping

Concepts:

When I set out onto campus to find interesting locations to project onto, I immediately thought of the University commons buildings, more specifically their front entrances. Their round, tiered design is quite unique, and reminded me of a UFO, which makes sense considering the campus' astronomical history. I decided, then, to base my projection off the alien mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

For a second composition, I chose the Natural Science and Engineering Research Lab in the far-North of the campus. I pass this building often and always thought the panels on the side would be an interesting backing for projecting movies onto from Lot T across the street. My chosen theme depended on what movie I decided to project. I chose the 1968 version of Night of the Living Dead because of its novelty and it's status as a public domain work.

Techniques:

 For the University Commons entrance, the most important technique I had to utilize was mesh warping, which I used on every quad on the screen. This helped emphasize the depth and the shape of the building. This worked much better than using chained lines with applied textures. After I had made all of the accents (most of them using the "Line Anim" material), I felt the composition was still a bit lacking, so I applied two warped quads with the "Diagonals" material, and set them to a low opacity to mimic the mothership's wandering blue and red lights as a background. I also included a flashing panel on the topmost tier to make it look similar to the communication light panel from the final scene of the movie. I accomplished this by taking the "Simplex" material, setting the gradient to "Color_Cut", increasing the Noise Strop, then applying the "Pixelate" FX Type.

For the Natural Science and Engineering Research Lab, by far the most important aspect was projecting the movie. Due to the panels on the side of the building being spaced apart, this looked a bit off. I went through with it though in favor of projecting a larger image than if I had projected the movie on just one of the panels. In case the viewer would rather look at a smaller, but less distorted image, I added a second image of the movie onto the small tower on the left side of the building. The rest of the composition relied on creating a decorative border that would be interesting while not being too big of a distraction. I opted for putting an image of the movie poster on either side of the building and added a blood-red "clouds" material to fill the negative space, using masks to keep it from interfering with the posters and the movie. I felt this was still too bare, so I added a few iterations of  "Waveform" that I tied to the movie audio. This made for a great utilization of the movie's sound design.

Interpretation:

More than anything, I intended these compositions to be entertaining. There is plenty of interesting architecture around UTD, and utilizing that feeling for fun and whimsy seemed like a gre use of the buildings and the projection technology. In my own realm of the interpretation, the only other thing these compositions presented me was a challenge in design and meticulous tweaking and editing.

Image Sources: 

https://lovecraftianscience.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/ce-lights.jpg

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/FailingSelfishDogfish-size_restricted.gif

Movie Source:

https://archive.org/details/PhantasmagoriaTheater-NightOfTheLivingDead1968321

A side note:

I apologize for the Madmapper watermarks on the videos. I anticipated working on this project for a multitude of hours so I opted to do the work at home with a trial version of Madmapper. After this I plan to rent the full version to dodge the many issues the trial version presented me

Megan Thompson - Projection 1 Backdrop Mapping

Assignment One - Background Mapping

Concept

For this project, I struggled to come up with a concept because I saw so many interesting visuals, I kept changing my theme every ten minutes. My first concept focuses on the uncertainty of our earths future. In this fantasy world, the earth is now a fallout zone and harmful chemicals are polluting the air.  While my first project is about the end of mankind, my second project is the polar opposite. Project two focuses on the human figure and form. The visuals along the top of the building represent the organic nature of our bodies and the world around us. 

Technique 

My first step was to take pictures of a building that I thought would "lend itself to spatial activation through projection mapping." I took a lot of pictures of different buildings and spaces that I found interesting and that made it difficult to pick just one for my project. In the end, I decided to use the Engineering building as I felt it left me with a lot of possibilities.

Since this was my first time in madMapper I watched a lot of tutorials on YouTube, however I found there to be far less tutorials about this Software than others such as Photoshop or Premier. Once I felt that I had a grasp on the basics I imported my media and got started. I spent a long time practicing masking out things that I wanted to be in front of my visuals, and I think it came out looking good. However, I still have a lot to learn. Once I mapped out all of my quads I went looking for visuals. From looking at my other student examples it looks as though some people make their own visuals, since I did not know how to do that I searched for visuals online and found a lot of cool loops on Vimeo.com. The artist goes by "beeple" on the website and I was amazed by the quality of his videos, especially because they are free to download. 
Considering I have never used madMapper or anything similar to it, I am proud of my outcome and think that I now have a good beginners grasp on the software itself. 



Interpretation 

While everyone will have a different interpretation of these videos my idea was for the ambiance of project one to be a little uneasy. I loved the game Fallout and I thought it would be cool to bring the Fallout to UTD through technology. My second project on the other hand was intended to spread a lighter message. I want viewers to see it and feel at ease with their body and mind. Overall I think madMapper is a really cool software and projection mapping is an awesome technology with a lot of possibilities, I'm excited to learn more about it.