Projection Mapping - Olga In Colour
A rocky road for me, but I soldiered on, barefoot - Olga was getting impatient with me.
Produced by: James Tregaskis
Introduction
Olga in Colour
I assembled the Olga kit in my garage with Theo V., It was a bit of a struggle but it soon came together.
We kept in touch with all the others in our group via messenger as many people were abroad at the time, as far as Romania and Zambia.
Concept and background research
Olga is a kit marketed by https://heavym.net/en/. It all clipped together easily (after a bit of head scratching)... this provided our group with an interesting and varied surface of conjoined triangles to work with.
I used Gimp to trace a phto of the outline of our Olga assembly and sent it back into messenger so everyone had ahead start.
In my case, I had the unfortunate luck of having a Dell XPS 13 laptop which really struggled to work with ofxPimapper. I had installed Linux Mint on the machine - but I soon found that many people reported problems running Linux on this particular laptop in the Dell forums.
In the meantime, I used my Dell to compose the three scenes outside FBO and ofxPimapper; however, I also discovered that it is a very different story when the three classes I wrote were integrated into the FBO project.
It was not until well after Christmas that I had access to an iMac, which allowed me to complete my assignment - as everyone will know from my frequent postings on the Creative Coding forum!
Technical
I have now purchased a new MacBook Pro (on the day of the popup exhibition) and have
revisited and recompiled the project (after I submitted a rather wonky delivery to Theo on time).
This is shown in my video, I hope you like the third class which I re-wrote.
The three scenes (one class per scene) - all make references to the triangular shapes of Olga and use as
much colour as possible. I wanted to use Perlin noise to vary the shapes and colours; in one class
I use a combination of Sin and Perlin to create interesting curves, all independently coloured.
Future development
I would like to have more experience and try out projection mapping further, it was all too rushed at the end, due to the circumstances I found myself in. I would like to see some form of interctivity with sensors in the space being used to project the mapping software, that would be a further step for me as well.
Self evaluation
I have learned a great deal from the project despite having one hand tied behind my back and
look forward to using my new Mac, no excuses from now on!
I found my programming to be too convoluted/fiddly and CPU intensive and I have learned from the others that it is much better to write lean and simple graphics, they not only look better but run smoother, without hanging the machine.
References
Lewis Lepton on YouTube
Daniel Schiffman NatureOfCode.com/text and YouTube
openprocessing.org
Generative Art: A Practical Guide Using Processing Matt Pearson