Weekly Recap 1
I started this site 11 years ago to share some of the things I was learning while working day to day in mograph studios. Then it was mostly C4D / After Effects, these days it’s a bit more technical. I’m going to try to start a weekly recap of some interesting bits.
Most of my work is experiential these days, large public art installs. Currently I’m turning a large metal sculpture into a “drivable” spaceship. (Pic from the year 1 install) Lots of star fields controlled with a joystick. The Speed CHOP in #touchdesigner saved me on this one.
Before finding the Speed CHOP I was trying to drive the controls with multipliers of abs.Time but it was so jittery and generally unstable. The Speed CHOP is perfect for this use case. I feed in the x / y sliders from the control, problem solved.
Most of the installs I’ve worked on the last two years have had multiple projectors, and the audience can walk through, or even on the projection canvas. Because of that I’ve had to deliver all of my animations in UV space…
We scan each install and I clean up the model and the content plays back as an animated texture on the model, projector positions are calibrated via the model on site. So again, content is delivered in UV space. I could not do this without Houdini.
For the spaceship look I’ve needed to add a lot of complexity to each face of my model, but retain the original UVs. The Ray SOP makes this so easy. I can project the new geo to the original and inherit the original UVs. Also, extrusion based on attributes with the Poly Extrude SOP.
There are actually multiple ways to render content to UV, but this week I leaned on Redshift for that. The Render Map section of the RS Rop will render an object with lighting to its UV layout.
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