Cycle 2: Stove Maps
Posted: December 15, 2023 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »For my cycle 2, I was mostly focused on how I was physically going to present my outputs in motion lab. Since I had already created a main mechanism (my stove), I wanted to start work on the more visual element of the project.
In addition to the stove, I had decided to add a sink element, as this was another interactive piece of a kitchen/house I felt I could incorporate. I used Shadertoy to find a simple water GLSL shader that I connected to my sink user actor. When activated by pressing the tinfoil of the “faucet,” the GLSL shader would fade in, making the sink look full.
I used an alpha mask to achieve this effect. At this point, all of these “activations,” (like this and the stove burners) were happening by jump++ actors jumping to new scenes. This was a quick and dirty way of activating these elements, but I would soon have to update these to work more seamlessly within the same scene in order to simplify my patch and output.
Once I started working in motion lab, I first had to decide how I would handle the different output streams I had in my Isadora patch. I knew I needed at least two projectors: one that would show the background of the kitchen, and one that would show the stove top and sink.
Above are my sink and stove blocks–I had to be aware of how I could position them so that the top-down projector would still hit them. Now that they had been positioned, it was onto output stream management and mapping. I was using the Mac Pro in motion lab, and it took me a long time to sort out how to manage my outputs using the triple head and matrix switcher so that the correct images would project from the correct places. Not only did the matrix switcher have to be set correctly, but I had to fix my Isadora output so that each projection element was on its own stage. I got a lot of help from Alex on this, which was definitely needed.
Finally, I got it set so I could map. Above is my mapped sink. Even though it was mapping a square onto another square, it took a fair amount of time to find where exactly on the floor of motion lab the small sink was, and how I had to move it in order for it to be placed correctly.
From my presentation, I was finally able to present the idea of the space to the class. I got some valuable feedback in terms of switching the direction my stove and sink faced and decided to implement that going into cycle 3.