Initial research

This is the blog for my final major project at the University of Creative Arts where I will be showing the progress on creating an animation which is going to projected onto a live action actor and set. This is called 3D projection mapping and has been quite popular in advertisements.

Other 3D projection animations are usually purely designed to show of the visual effects which come from projection mapping. My animation will aim to integrate animation and reality in order to portray a story to an audience.

My initial inspiration for this was actually a few years ago when I saw a mobile phone advert by the French creative agency, "SUPERBIEN". Which you can watch on vimeo at http://vimeo.com/10692284 . My animation won't interact with as many objects and it will be a lot simpler, but hopefully as visually impressive as possible. What SUPERBIEN do is called 3D projection mapping, which I have said before. They project a 2D image which is distorted in such a way so that the light hits the object in a way where it undoes the distortion and the 2D image is wrapped around the 3D objects. If something is closer to the projector then the part of the 2D image hitting that closer object needs to be smaller, since the closer something is to the projector, the larger the projection is on the object, so you basically get an inverse 3D model of the actual scene being projected, this is something I will definitely be using a lot in my animation.

In my project I intend to only use a single live action actor with a very simple design so complex algorithms are not needed to precisely map the 2D image like in the majority of  projection mapping, which are usually designed to play with the faces and edges of the objects like with Toyota's brilliant 3D projection, which you can see at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJ7E7uEZN00.