There was a great question that recently popped up on the Forum about using the Stoner component from the Palette.
Every time I use the stoner tool I delete these ops first thing.
Read the whole thread
For some reason the locked TOP doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the real output, yet it saves that data with the TOE and it’s easy for the toe to be huge for no reason.
I had 3 4K stoners and the file was 150 mb. Remove these ops and the toe goes to 140KB
Stoner throws errors when moving points after deleting these, however doesn’t seem to impact the functionality of the stoner, it still outputs the correct UV and warp texture. It still persists the data after a save.
Can someone explain why those ops are even there? it looks only like it’s saving the demo image before you start using it.
Long story short, what looks like a ramp is actually a displacement map. The idea here is that you can actually get all of the benefits of the stoner’s displacement, without running the whole component. Unless your mapping is changing dynamically, you can instead use this texture to drive a remap TOP which in turn handles your distortion. Richard Burns wrote a lovely little piece about this on Visualesque.
I wrote about what these ops are good for in a post a few years ago when working on a short installation that was in Argentina – Building a Calibration UI. Sadly, I never got to the second part of that post to dig into how we could actually use this feature of the stoner. Fast forward a few years and when collaborating with Zoe Sandoval on their thesis project (which featured four channels of projection) – { remnants } of a { ritual } – I used a very similar approach to leveraging Stoner’s flexibility to use a single UI for multiple displacement maps.
So… how do we actually use it?!
Well, I finally had some time to knock out a walk through of how to make this work in your projects, some python to help you get it moving and organized quickly, and ways to keep your calibration data out of your project file. Hope this sheds some light on some of the ways you can better take advantage of the Stoner.
Check out a sample project here.
Matthew Ragan 