Hey there,
I’m doing my graduation work and this looks like Lightact could be very useful since I’m using UE4 and all the other tools are expensive as heck to just use for mapping, warping and edge blending.
I am a sparetime projectionmapper where I have been using Resolume with my friends.
Now I can’t see a way to do the advanced mapping like Resolume Arena where you trace polys on top of your layers and warp them to align with the real sculpture.
Have I overlooked this and if so please point me in the right direction? I’ve seen all the tutorials.
Lightact, at the moment, offers 2 approaches to projection mapping.
2D mapping
2D mapping is best explained in this video tutorial.
I assume you’ve watched it.
3D mapping
3D mapping refers to placing 3D objects into the Visualizer and mapping textures onto them using UV maps. Please note that this approach is experimental and is still quite rough around the edges. If you want to learn more about it have a look at projection mapping User Guides
Have a look at the above links and let me know which feature you are missing. I’d be interested to know.
I would normally do all my visuals and tracking in Unreal. I don’t understand how would you do it in Lightact but if the sculpture uses triangles instead of solely quads how do you align your spout output with the projector view? Do you just align the virtual cameras in unreal perfectly with the actual projectors?
I made this a few months ago. Using UE4 with a 2D Capture rendering out the scene from your virtual POV and via some clever math it is being used in a separate material that gets applied to a duplicate of that captured scene and aligns around perfectly.
Now if I can send that 2Dcapture texture via spout to Lightact and emulate that material here I probably don’t need that feature I requested previously!
@David thought of another approach that might be useful for you.
Every texture that you’d want to apply to an individual facet of your object goes through a Texture warp node, so you can individually warp it. All of these textures are then mapped to the same canvas and then send to the same video screen or projector for final output. A created a quick layout showing what we mean.
