Here’s our second stop in a series about planning out part of a long term installation’s UI. We’ll focus on looking at the calibration portion of this project, and while that’s not very sexy, it’s something I frequently set up gig after gig – how you get your projection matched to your architecture can be tricky, and if you can take the time to build something reusable it’s well worth the time and effort. In this case we’ll be looking at a five sided room that uses five projectors. In this installation we don’t do any overlapping projection, so edge blending isn’t a part of what we’ll be talking about in this case study
As many of you have already found there’s a wealth of interesting examples and useful tools tucked away in the palette in touch designer. If you’re unfamiliar with this feature, it’s located on the left hand side of the interface when you open touch, and you can quickly summon it into existence with the small drawer and arrow icon:
Tucked away at the bottom of the tools list is the stoner. If you’ve never used the stoner it’s a killer tool for all your grid warping needs. It allows for key stoning and grid warping, with a healthy set of elements that make for fast and easy alterations to a given grid. You can bump points with the keyboard, you can use the mouse to scroll around, there are options for linear curves, bezier curves, persepective mapping, and bilinear mapping. It is an all around wonderful tool. The major catch is that using the tox as is runs you about 0.2 milliseconds when we’re not looking at the UI, and about 0.5 milliseconds when we are looking at the UI. That’s not bad, in fact that’s a downright snappy in the scheme of things, but it’s going to have limitations when it comes to scale, and using multiple stoners at the same time.
That’s slick. But what if there was a way to get almost the same results at a cost of 0 milliseconds for photos, and only 0.05 milliseconds when working with video? As it turns out, there’s a gem of a feature in the stoner that allows us to get just this kind of performance, and we’re going to take a look at how that works as well as how to take advantage of that feature.
Let’s start by taking a closer look at the stoner itself. We can see now that there’s a second outlet on our op. Let’s plug in a null to both outlets and see what we’re getting.
Well hello there, what is this all about?!
Our second output is a 32 bit texture made up of only red and green channels. Looking closer we can see that it’s a gradient of green in the top left corner, and red in the bottom right corner. If we pause here for a moment we can look at how we might generate a ramp like this with a GLSL Top.
If you’re following along at home, let’s start by adding a GLSL Top to our network. Next we’ll edit the pixel shader.
out vec4 fragColor;
void main()
{
fragColor = vec4( vUV.st , 0.0 , 1.0 );
}
So what do we have here exactly? For starters we have an explicit declaration of our out vec4 (in very simple terms – our texture that we want to pass out of the main loop); a main loop where we assign values to our output texture.
What’s a vec4?
In GLSL vectors are a data type. We use vectors for all sorts of operations, and as a datatype they’re very useful to us as we often want variable with several positions. Keeping in mind that GLSL is used in pixeltown (one of the largest burrows on your GPU), it’s helpful to be able to think of variables that carry multiple values – like say information about a red, green, blue, and alpha value for a given pixel. In fact, that’s just what our vec4 is doing for us here, it represents the RGBA values we want to associate with a given pixel.
vUV is an input variable that we can use to locate the texture coordinate of a pixel. This value changes for every pixel, which is part of the reason it’s so useful to us. So what is this whole vec4( vUV.st, 0.0, 1.0) business? In GL we can fill in the values of a vec4 with a vec2 – vUV.st is our uv coordinate as a vec2. In essence what we’ve done is say that we want to use the uv coordinates to stand in for our red and green values, blue will always be 0, and our alpha will always be 1. It’s okay if that’s a wonky to wrap your head around at the moment. If you’re still scratching your head you can read more at links below
Read about more GLSL Data Types
Read about writing your own GLSL TOP
Okay, so we’ve got this silly gradient, but what is it good for?!
Let’s move around our stoner a little bit to see what else changes here.
That’s still not very sexy – I know, but let’s hold on for just one second. We first need to pause for a moment and think about what this might be good for. In fact, there’s a lovely operator that this plays very nicely with. The remap TOP. Say what now? The remap top can be used to warp input1 based on a map in input2. Still scratching your head? That’s okay. Let’s plugin a few other ops so we can see this in action. We’re going to rearrange our ops here just a little and add a remap TOP to the mix.
Here we can see that the red / green map is used on the second input our our remap top, and our movie file is used on the first input.
Okay. But why is this anything exciting?
Richard Burns just recently wrote about remapping, and he very succinctly nails down exactly why this is so powerful:
It’s commonly used by people who use the stoner component as it means they can do their mapping using the stoners render pipeline and then simply remove the whole mapping tool from the system leaving only the remap texture in place.
If you haven’t read his post yet it’s well worth a read, and you can find it here.
Just like Richard mentions we can use this new feature to essentially completely remove or disable the stoner in our project once we’ve made maps for all of our texture warping. This is how we’ll get our cook time down to just 0.05 milliseconds.
Let’s look at how we can use the stoner to do just this.
For starters we need to add some empty bases to our network. To keep things simple for now I’m just going to add them to the same part of the network where my stoner lives. I’m going to call them base_calibration1 and base_calibration2.
Next we’re going to take a closer look at the stoner’s custom parameters. On the Stoner page we can see that there’s now a place to put a path for a project.
Let’s start by putting in the path to our base_calibration1 component. Once we hit enter we should see that our base_calibration1 has new set of inputs and outputs:
Let’s take a quick look inside our component to see what was added.
Ah ha! Here we’ve got a set of tables that will allow the stoner UI to update correctly, and we’ve got a locked remap texture!
So, what do we do with all of this?
Let’s push around the corners of our texture in the stoner and hook up a few nulls to see what’s happening here.
You may need to toggle the “always refresh” parameter on the stoner to get your destination project to update correctly. Later on we’ll look at how to work around this problem.
So far so good. Here we can see that our base_calibration1 has been updated with the changes we made to the stoner. What happens if we change the project path now to be base_calibration2? We should see that inputs and outputs are added to our base. We should also be able to make some changes to the stoner UI and see a two different calibrations.
Voila! That’s pretty slick. Better yet if we change the path in the stoner project parameter we’ll see that the UI updates to reflect the state we left our stoner in. In essence, this means that you can use a single stoner to calibrate multiple projectors without needing multiple stoners in your network. In fact, we can even bypass or delete the stoner from our project once we’re happy with the results.
There are, of course, a few things changes that we’ll make to integrate this into our project’s pipeline but understanding how this works will be instrumental in what we build next. Before we move ahead take some time to look through how this works, read through Richard’s post as well as some of the other documentation. Like Richard mentions, this approach to locking calibration data can be used in lots of different configurations and means that you can remove a huge chunk of overhead from your projects.
Next we’ll take the lessons we’ve learned here combined with the project requirements we laid out earlier to start building out our complete UI and calibration pipeline.
Matthew Ragan 