help figuring out a 360 mapping system?

[JMC]

big project coming up and dipping my toes into mapping and VJ'ing in general... never mapped before, never VJ'd before , we are mapping two projects with 360 degree projections covering the set.

one setup is a circular shape dj booth with the two projectors set up either side. we want to make the object seem to spin around so we will need two outputs one for each projector ie no mirroring so both sides of the object spin the correct way.
so we set up the cg model/ structure in maya/cinema 4d make some nice renders and film our renders back with cameras in 3d space on either side of the structure. everything is done to scale so it should line up with minimal adjustments needed on set, now we have these two renders of each side whats the best way to get them out/best workflow?

the other setup is with four projectors on each side of a large pyramid type structure. this is the really hard one as we want 4 seperate projections so we can do procedural animation ie no doubling up/ mirroring. we set up our cg model in maya/ cinema4d all built to scale and make a nice scene up, and film back our renders using 4 cameras so everything lines up more or less with the structure.

but the question then is how to get those 4 renders / video files into a vj program/resolume and out to the 4 seperate projectors. we'd like to be able to affect them all together with various FX chains etc.

how do we do it? is it possible? get an old mac pro and upgrade it to x4 graphics cards? but then how do we get 4 output feeds/ canvases all running synced up together can you do multiple canvas/output windows ? will this eat up RAM is it viable or should we forget about it? do we do some kind of soft edge blending where you make a massive canvas x4 the size of one render, and put all four 1k sides of the pyramid in one big 4k render then apportion a quadrant to each projector somehow? wont that eat up RAM too would that be a viable solution?

ah yeah and is if this isnt complicated enough, none of our projections are going to line up completly so we need to use something like madmapper or qc to keystone/adjust warp /corner pin our renders in place so doing that on one big soft edged render probably wont work will it?

any help with this is really appreciated

[Stickygreen]

sounds like you need to hire someone who knows what there doing...

Almost everything you have listed here, is not for beginners. You will encounter many problems and issues that will get frustrating, and expensive. I would strongly recommend you to get someone with experience on board with your team.

[Joris]

As much as you probably don't want to hear this, StickyGreen has a point. All the setups you mention are possible, but far from basic.

It sounds like you have a fair bit of knowledge in house, and given enough time, you could probably make it work by yourself. But you will save yourself a considerable amount of time, money and frustration if you get someone on board to at least advise you in this.

Your questions are far too complex to be easily answered on a forum. but maybe you can find someone who's able to help in your area on this board?

[JMC]

thanks for the comments, id love to hire someone but we are doing it with no money/self funded so thats not an option and besides we want to learn how to do it ourselves. i dont think its over complicated to ask for help on a forum , if i cant ask here where can i ask! if anyone wants to get involved as a technical advisor then you are more than welcome to join us on our project

[synapse_gh]

Stickygreen and goto10 both hit this on the head, this is a truly enormous learning gap to cover for your very first mapping / VJing project.

If you absolutely don't have the funding to hire someone, then hopefully you can at least set up a whole bunch of shop testing time?

A day or three of advance time spent with a scale model of your set and a set of office-sized projectors will let you work out some of the major kinks ahead of time, and help you reduce the pressure once you get on site with expensive gear and limited time. If you haven't already achieved a complete "dress rehearsal" run-through of your show before you set foot on site, you're opening yourself up to an awful lot of risk.

Where are you located, and when is the show?

[JMC]

im located in london. we have 2 months until d-day. we have a warehouse with one stage already built which we can use for a dresss -rehearsal , the other stage which is much larger wont be built until a week or two before on site. we are working with a mates a/v company and they are cool to bring the projectors to the warehouse for a dress rehearsal , and we are getting good tech support from them at mates rates. they are providing all the cables support and know how to get the projectors set up. we'll probably only get one proper practice session in that way before hand, but i may be able to build some scale models out of foamboard or card or something and use some cheap office projectors . i hear you saying we are way out of our depth but we think we can do it and have been planning it for months. its for quite a big gig. our background is in vfx , we're used to working with complicated software under pressure and with time constraints, and thinking 3 dimensionally , we're part of a very large top vfx company full of programmers r&d techhies and artists so this is something we are doing for fun outside of work as a bit of a creative release. if anyone with any experience in london wants to get involved feel free we'd welcome the experience and knowledge anyone can bring!

we;ve already built all our models to scale in maya and have all our measurements down , we know we will be using madmapper or possible a 1024 qc plugin for keystoning ( would be nice to get some wii-motes working with that) , all we really need to do is build a custom pc with 4 or 8 GPU outputs (budget is about 700-1000 for that self funded) and work whther to use VDMX, resolume or modul8 to run 4 output windows simultaneously in the same project for the 4 sided projection, and for the 2 sided projection we already have a mbook pro we can use with a matrox head so we just need to work out how smoothly we can run two GPU outputs and which software works best

[Joris]

Like I said, you have a fair bit of knowledge in house, and it helps a lot that you have an AV company on board to help you wit the tech side.

This being the Resolume forum, I wouldn't rule out Arena just yet. I'm not quite sure how and if MadMapper handles multiple GPUs (best check the MM forums for that).

If you're really on a tight budget (which is strange for the size of the project you're taking on), you can of course tinker something together in QC. Speaking from personal experience though, I love tinkering with QC, but when I need to get a mapping up and working in the stress of a live environment, I don't want to have to noodle around my code that worked great last night but somehow is acting strange now....

Anyway, those are my two cents, good luck and if you choose to go with Resolume, we're always here to help if you have specific questions.

[JMC]

thanks, ive posted for advice on a few forums and this is certainly one of the friendlier responses ive got. i have some reading to do this week on all the various user manuals/docs of modul8/vdmx/resolume/mmapper but once ive got through that i will come back with some resolume questions i expect

[JMC]

ok so on reading the user docs it seems pretty simple, you just render out your 4 sides of the shape all in one render one in each quarter of the screen (out of Nuke in our case) , then you assign them to slices and screens/projectors, and then you use the grid warper to make individual keystone adjustments on each slice. its a really simple easy way of doing it. theres just a few issues with resolution to iron out , as we are making photorealistc CGI with Nuke and Maya.

thanks for the input, its kind of as i suspected the mapping bit is pretty simple and unsophisticated (compared to using maya and nuke)

[JMC]

just got back from Glade festival where i used resolume for the meteor stage performance on saturday night. it all went really well, it only crashed once when i tried to trigger a whole column of layers, apart form that it was pretty amazing and we smashed it . will try and find some video or pics