News
Mapping software at Nuits sonores | Joanie Lemercier | AntiVJWe are travelling a lot this month for various projects around Europe and Canada, and we are doing many projects using the mapping projection technique.Last week we did an interesting project for the 'Nuits Sonores' festival in Lyon - France. We've been asked to do the stage design for one room of the festival, so we combined ideas discovered in previous projects (Light sculptures and light painting) to do a minimal and geometric setup.This was the perfect opportunity to test the latest version of our mapping software in live condition, and it worked really well: it only took a few minutes to map the 3D dj booth, and then many visuals and loops were already ready to play, when it usually took a couple of hours to p0roduce basic animations.Here are a few pictures and videos found on internet, and we'll do a video report shortly, with more visuals and details about the project.
We are in Montreal at the moment, and we'll be back in UK on Tuesday with loads of videos and news about the software.
Mapping souvenirs | Joanie Lemercier | AntiVJIt is really interesting to look back at my early mapping projects, and realise all the progress that I made since 2006.Here's my very first mapping test (on my neighbours house in Bristol), with a small projector projecting light through the window.
There are only a few rectangles and squares, and there all very simples, but it took me several hours to create masks and to adapt the visual content (I was using the "grid technique" at the time).
Then a few months after this other project in a small gallery in Berlin,and I mapped some visuals on a corner. The perpective was quite strong here, and it was such a long and laborious process, so I had to find a better technique than the time-consuming grid system.
This was an video was an interesting exercice, I wanted to project on many different objects, with many faces and plans, and turn really low tech objects (pieces of paper) into exciting light emitting displays. The result looks quite simple, but in fact there was a long setup, and some video editing to syncho the music properly.
With the new mapping software, what used to take me a few hours would now be possible within 5 minutes, and most of the content will now be generated on the fly.Here are the new ideas and features that will be implemented:
- Actionscript based animations and sequences, stored in an external file, will give the ability to create simple and effective realtime animations with basic AS langage and any basic text editor.
- Shader: this will enable you to use existing flash shaders, and develop your own visual effects.
- more to come..
Mapping software update | Joanie Lemercier | AntiVJWe've been very busy developping the mapping software, and we've made a lot of progress in the technical approach. Here are a few details of the latest updates:
- Vectors: To get the best possible mapping, the best way is to work with vectors. It's gives you the ability to to very precise fine tuning, and and can select and moves individual objects, lines or points (up to a sub-pixel level, thanks to antialiasing).
- XML format: once the visual mapping is done, we'll be able to export the data as XML files, and reuse a perfect mapping into different softwares, like vvvv, cinema 4D, flash baseds engines etc..
- Client / server: We have built the engine with local or remote connection system, so this will give us the ability to stream content or play visuals from any computer, not only from the computer connected to the projector. This will be very convenient when mapping big volumes (buildings, architecture), as we'll be ables to map form any laptop with a wireless connection !
- Live mode: Originnaly we planned to create an mapping editor, but then we realised that they were amazing things to do with a simple "LIVE" mode, to create and generate mapping content (live from rss feeds, perspective distortion etc..)
- Automatic 3D mapping, realtime mapping..We also worked more on different engines to map objects instantly, we'll post more details about this very soon !We're also working on an physics engine, particles system and a few more eyes candies..
Reflection mapping, a new approach to 3D mapping 
Everything is built on libraries and classes system, so it will be easy to add functionnalities.The engine is now almost ready, and we hope to post some footage of the first experiments very soon !
