Cycle 2
Posted: December 11, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Several key take aways from cycle 1 defined my approach to cycle 2:
- Projection mapping is going to be a lot harder than I expected.
- Find a way out of the complexity. The decision to project onto a structure under active development means that I have no stability in projection mapping. I need to either find a faster way to build the castle and/or a more flexible approach to projection mapping.
- Go all in on immersion. Front facing projection is going to be inadequate. The contrast between an animated forward face and the dead sides destroys the immersion on the experience. Conversely, participants in the experience wanted to interact with it. Providing pathways to interact with the castle could be a big win for immersion.
- The little things are the big things. There is a lot of potential delight in thoughtfully-placed, well-executed micro-animations.
The key to all of this is in my ability to improve my approach to projection mapping. As suggested during the feedback session, I decided to pursue an approach where I could fix my projection mapping once.
There were a number of options available to me. The easiest way to decrease my risk and create a positive experience would be to nix the castle and project onto something that was rigid, static, and reproducible; however in terms of the RSVP cycle, the castle was a major part of my valuation and was therefore non-negotiable.
The next option to consider was to expedite development on the castle. This was appealing, but only to a point. Castle construction involved the use of power tools. While there’s an upper limit to how fast it is advisable to move when working with a blade spinning at 3500 RPM, increasing the efficiency of my techniques for building the castle (score) without sacrificing safety was a good idea.
My plans for the castle included several hexagonal and several cylindrical towers. With no lathe available (resources) to create dowels, I relied on a process to build my cylindrical towers that included using a hole saw to cut out sections of the tower that I could later stack. This approach allowed me precise control over the tapering at the top and bottoms of the towers. I directly adapted this approach to create my hexagonal towers, by using the radii of the circle to mark out the vertices of the hexagon, then using a bandsaw to cut down to the edges.
To make this process more efficient, I can use a table saw with the blade set to 30º to do 2 rip cuts down the length of a board to dramatically decrease the time cost for building a hexagonal tower with a manageable increase to safety risk.
Beyond improving my building techniques, I was able to decide decrease the complexity of my castle design. I reduced the overall number of towers in my plan and I altered my approach to building rooftops. This reduced the overall risk to my project, but the castle remained a significant risk. Mistakes in the digital space can be undone with a keystroke. Mistakes in woodworking (of the non-digit removing variety) come with a much larger time cost.
For the digital side of the Cycle 2, I devised several new approaches to handle my projection mapping. My initial concept was simple enough. Scene 1 would Get Stage Image from Virtual Stages and feed those through pre-mapped projectors for the specific image.
The top of this page outlines some of the ideas I had for projecting. The bottom half outlines my concept for simplifying my projection mapping.
The execution went a little off the rails. I chose to build this approach by projecting onto a cube instead of the castle with the expectation that I could build the scaffolding with a simple use case and easily scale up my approach with a more complex target surface. Looking back at my initial concept, it seems manageable, but during the execution I got lost in the weeds and couldn’t fully understand what was going on in Isadora. During cycle 2 I had a basic grasp of how to work the Motion Lab media controls, but was not completely fluent. I also struggled to fully understand how a virtual stage actually works. In the end I built a user actor to accept media assets as inputs and tweak the parameters of the target projection.
This approach was more simple than my initial concept early on, but quickly became more complex and unwieldy as I needed to expand the User Actor to adapt to my use cases. I was ultimately able to get this approach to work, but it did not yield a dramatic improvement in efficiency over my Cycle 1 projection mapping approach.
For the Cycle 2 performance, I elected to drop the background projection and focus on the Castle projections. I kept the forward facing projector for simplicity’s sake, electing to add the necessary complexity after tackling the mapping challenges. I changed the castle texture to a style that more accurately captured my intent. I added some delightful micro-animations like flags that illuminated and a fire that flickered in the entry hallway. I stripped the music to allow my castle to stand on its own (though I had full intention of bringing music back during Cycle 3).
I also created fireworks using the 3D particles actor that I did not display until a classmate specifically recommended it. The fireworks were time-consuming to produce in Isadora and the effect was shabby at best. Still, my ultimate plan was to make them an interactive component of the final presentation, so I persisted. The ultimate effect was underwhelming.
During the feedback session for cycle 2, a classmate pointed out that the light bleed on the main projector screen made for a cool effect. I hadn’t noticed this prior to it being pointed out, but I agreed and took note.
Another piece of feedback centered around the sizing of the stones on the facade. It took a lot of effort to bring them in and map them out, but they were turning out to present more trouble than the value they provided.