matt.beghin

LED display is becoming more and more popular, good (energy saving) and bad (manufacturing of led is very polluting and life time is generally bad). Anyway, I’ve be suggested to work on a 3D LED Display project. The LEDs are generally used for 2D displays, like a video screeb, but LED tubes or transparent LED screens makes it easy to go for 3D. We can find good examples over the web:

G-Lec Led displays with content rendered specially for this display, as a 2D video made of 10 sub pictures that would be mapped to each 2D plan:

This one is minimalist, not really video but a good example:

The best I found is the one from Visual Drugstore also using GLec Leds. In this setup there are two different ways to feed the system. In both case, the end result is one 2D picture composed of one sub-picture for each 2D plan.
Case 1: the picture has be preproduced with a 3D software, rendering one 2D video for each plan and recomposing it in a wide 2D picture
Case 2: a vj software is producing a 2D picture that makes the first sub-pictures, a time-slice effect will feed the other pictures. It works fine. But from what I know, the setup of this was a bit heavy compared to what I could do in a few hours coding an effect for arKaos, or even a FreeFrame effect (FFGL or standard FF) which would work with various softwares.
Here it is:

http://www.visualdrugstore.com/news/?p=1348

So, driving a 3D display is not new,but it’s rare, so there are many things that have not been done yet. I’ve been thinking of two things: making an effect for arKaos softs to create the time-slice effect, and create a flash library to display 3D objects in a set of 2D sub-pictures on a wide picture. This could lead in an easy way to create animations, and audio-reactive animations of 3D objects in the scene and seding it to the screen through the LED Output of arKaos MediaMaster.

So I investigated both ideas and get it working. To see it working I made a setup on my laptop with WYSIWYG (cast-lighting visualization software) and arKaos MediaMaster, connected through ArtNet DMX protocol (DMX through ethernet). In WYSIWYG I made a setup of 12×12x12 leds.

Demo I did using the time-slice effect (sorry it’s not that visible…):

3D Led display demo from matt beghin on Vimeo.

I’ll post more if the project goes on…

GrandVJ 1.2 is in version beta4 (link here). It now supports Quartz Composer (on Mac, 10.5 advised) as sources and visuals (partly documented here)
I had already heard tons of god things about QC (Quartz Composer), but a few weeks ago, I made an application (yes, using QuartzBuilder you can convert a Quartz Composition into an application with many options) and discovered how easy it was to develop multimedia applications and how powerful it was (most of the work is done in the graphic card. It is really a multimedia graphic programming environment that make it very fast to realize funky applications, visual effects and visual content (interactive or not).

I’ve been looking at many stuffs people did and many websites and got inspired to create some effects for arKaos applications and more. Well part of my work was adapting other people composition to make it effects for GrandVJ. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in Modul8 because Modul8 supports only Quart Composition in “safe mode” which is a reduced set of QC features. For security reasons, a Quartz file running in a browser must be safe: no file access, no camera access, no audio input etc. But why Modul8 is limited to safe patches ? Anyway GrandVJ is not

First this effect is really incredible: http://002.vade.info/?page_id=19. So I adapted it to make it a GrandVJ effect. Download below. Thanks to Bill Etra for sharing the code ! And congrats. I like it. Creating 3D from a 2D picture is generally of bad taste (int general 3D is but this effect is really not.

Here is the result:

Later on I found this great effect too: http://memo.tv/amoeba_dance_caliper_remote
I enjoyed it and I’m trying to see what can be done from there. Well it’s not as good as amoeba one for the moment, but I’ll work more on that:

Well, I forgot I also did a picture folder player with Quartz Composer. It could use the “text” variable of a GrandVJ layer to receive the folder path, the the movie speed to define how fast it should go from a picture to the next one.

I post the RuttEtra effect here. Thanks again to Bill Etra for this one.

v002 RuttEtra GrandVJ effect