Transdiciplinary Collaborative Project

At one point, i turned to the VVVV forums to get some advice about patching whilst i was trying to work it out myself. This was great since VVVV has so many nodes, it can be difficult to know which one to use for the job at hand.

Myself and Toni went off to find something to project onto in the meat time to have something for the presenation. For this, we went to the modelling course in another art building. We spoke to some tutors and were introduced to a student that had a car suitable for us to borrow. It may not have been a porsche, but the colour was perfect to project onto to show a working concept.

The evening before the presentation, i had spent some time working on setting up the projection. I measured the distance from the projector to the car and the height at which the projector was at. It was from this angle that i retook the image of the car and redid the image to be projected. This was to try and get the best result possible. On the day, i found out how to warp and adjust an image using the homography node. This meant i was able to adjust the perspective and position the image on the car more accurately. There was still some slight overhang but i think i could fix it with more time. This was the best angle to view it at and using the GUI Toni had refined and built in flash, were able to show a good concept that got people interested.

The deadline was fast approaching and i was still having no luck working out how to create a clickable icon in VVVV. We decided to just leave it and work on an animated GUI whilst operating the projection from the VVVV patch. A few days later, i began to think about the VVVV patch again. I thought about just having the icons placed there and creating a quad that was a button. It was then i realised that the quads were the buttons and the file texture would just be attached to the quad. I began to work on the patch again utilising a Button node which was an exsiting patch. I got this to work and when the desktop mouse was over the quad in the renderer, it would change colour. All i had to do then was work on a mouse click that would trigger something, creating a button.

During my attempt to keep the project going, i looked into different ways to program a GUI to work in conjunction with the projector. This is where i found Shoes, Python, Glade, GTK+, MSYS2, all of which are programs to code something. I do not know the first thing about any of these programs so i decided to go back and try VVVV again since i was familiar enough with how it worked.

Myself and Toni decided to try and project the car ready for the main presenation. We had some issues with VVVV working and getting the projector to work. Once we switched computers in the base room, we were able to get the projector to work but not VVVV. From here, we just decided to try and line up the images to the car.   We moved the angle of the projector and the car to try and get the best results but really struggled without the use of projection mapping. This was only because we were unsure of how to do it in VVVV. This shows that part of the car was not being projected on despite lining the front of the image up. I decided to take all the equiptment home and redo the images, measuring my distance and angle from the car. Toni began to redo the animate GUI i did and make a cleaner, polished fully functional version.

I considered our options and whether we would need to use VVVV or not. If we werent able to complete the main patch, it may be worth just using some simpler software to map out the projection. I suggested using a combination of software i had previous experience with. I was happy to refamiliarize myself with it and projection map that way. Upon some discussion in another session, we were happy to get the VVVV projection patch working and to carry on using it.  I then began to try a trial version of HeavyM as buying it was far too expensive. Unfortunately, i was unable to project a file texture but it may be worth looking into more to see if i could map the car and just use a colour selector to project the desired colour. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/theheavymteam/heavym-bring-projection-to-another-level   As stated before, i have used resolume professionally as a VJ at live events. It may take me a little while to readjust myself to it but i feel confident that i w