Herding.

Today i am playing around with a herding script in Maya. I have had some success in the past with it and identified possible problems with introducing the script into an already busy scene. I have discovered that the herding animation works best when on a positive zxy space as the locator is world -centric in its make up. (when the fish-in this case- move across the axis they translate by 90 degrees.) I am looking at assigning the herd leader to a separate locator and dis-associating it from the world space. This should solve the problem.

Or not. After running the script for a couple of time i have found it unstable; so i am going to look for another.
This is a shot of the water which i have been experimenting with.

 This shot is with the finished fish model introduced; and the caustics boosted.. The waves at the top should be hidden by the 'screen'. I have also introduced some simple geometry along the z axis to give the illusion of perspective.

I am still going to have to render the fish out separatly; and may have to key the fish in a more traditional way instead of using herds. The position of the light has got to be moved up so it produces more light in more of the scene.

So why not for the sake of art?

I was watching another one of these projection 'things' earlier and it occurred to me, why are there not any projections being performed just for the sake of being art? The answer i am becoming more aware of in a very realist way; through my pocket.
The majority of projections are either sponsored by some sort of big industry or council funded; the 'now' of projection mapping makes it a great eye-catching form of advertising and this is not going away. Like any medium, such as the good old printing press and the television, their exclusivity is most likely short lived. As the technology gets cheaper and the know-how becomes more widespread i am sure projection mapping will become a lot more widespread in our environment. And as the first public printed documents were for public use (such as Henry VIII's bible) privately sponsored more 'art driven' pieces will come into existence. The mixture of static geometry and digital light rendering is not marketable on the auction floor. But i am sure this is not far in the future.

For just now enjoy the start and end of this advert. The middle pays for it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSR0Xady02o&feature=related

Process.

Obeying image size is one thing . The pathway chucks up a few more problems along the way which i will attempt to highlight now. As an experiment; I have been mapping the passageway (as described below) and all went well until we hit the lens. The solution came by reversing the process, by projecting a grid on the architecture, taking a picture of it and the taking that back into the compositing software and laying the 3d model over the top. This left use only having to cope with the inherant lens distortion; as the camera lens is far from true.

Using the scan data i had to decide what part of the building was going to be my screen; where all the action was going to take place. I then took a polygon primitive (planar) and lined this up with the area. This gave me the size of the canvas needed for photoshop. After cropping my reference image down to the shot area; i was able to use the distort tool to correct the lens. This was then added as a texture in Maya and layered over the scan data to produce a correct modelling reference.

The pink colour is to differentiate between scan data and the modelled geometry. Awful ain't it!

Small task to test expected methods.

Atm i am working on modelling a bit of the uni that we can test certain methodologies out on. Ihave at first took a picture of the area and then measured the area.

As you can see it is a very angular section; but this is perfect for what we need. I am at the moment waiting for a projector and laptop to use for the process. And i will post the results...

A Few Thoughts on the' Stereo -Typical', and hopefully how we can avoid it...

I have been keeping an eye on Mapping projects and what content peoplle are using; and this has lead me to think that maybe a couple of tweeks could be made to ours without changing it too much. The shot i am worried about is the water shot, where the water pours out through the window. See it in sooo many. Im going to change it. But we will keep the water; and the fish; god how i love fish....   sorry bout that; now, the content of the water and how it is interpreted as water is the thing that we can get creative with. What im thinking is some really pretty dancing caustics; playing on  the underwater geometry; also highly visible in the water, on the kelp and the fish.
This is an example of what i am on about. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VCD6cRfRis

On the subject of being a bit  different i have been playing around with the idea of portable architecture; pre mapped which can be used as a portable exibit. Watch this space...