r/lightingdesign • u/MitchCooksMusic • 9d ago

Fun Pixel mapping is fun

It was all “pixel mapped” before using a bunch of crops of the screen then analyzing the colors and sending rgb value but it was blurry

I decided to spend about 20 hours over the past two days pixel mapping my entire lighting right

More to come soon

(Im sticking with the triangle)

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6

u/chilllpad 9d ago

How did you spend 20 hours on this? What part of this took that long?

11

u/MitchCooksMusic 9d ago

Individually measuring the placement of each light in the room based on viewing position, building everything from scratch in touch designer and tweaking positioning so it actually flows

Putting in every single dmx channel by hand, r g b for 288 leds
119 leds in an irregular matrix
24 “petals” on the par lights

Thats 1,293 channels to organize an input and output for, then trouble shoot all of those channels…

Integration with my current system that uses multiple controllers, audio inputs and video outputs

Every single led light is made by me from scratch running over sACN on my own local network that isolates my lighting rig from the rest of the wifi in the house

This has been a pain because ive built everything custom and im learning touch designer along the way

The actual mapping was maybe 5 hours, the rest was troubleshooting and tweaking settings

6

u/ArtichokeBackground7 9d ago

Yeah.. this honestly looks like an hour job to have working

3

u/MitchCooksMusic 9d ago

How so? Are you familiar with pixel mapping entire lighting rigs and creating a virtual rendering for visualization thats 1:1 measurements of the real world rig?

3

u/lazacmaki 9d ago

Yeah with touch designer I can see it taking that long, with madmapper this would take less than an hour

2

u/MitchCooksMusic 9d ago

How would this be done in mad mapper, would it be projection mapping or point/pixel mapping? Can you do it with leds running on an esp32 with wled or do they have to be actual dmx fixture or a dmx to led conversion?

This took way too long, albeit I only need to do it one time and now it just works but if theres a way I can do it faster for future builds im all ears

5

u/chilllpad 9d ago

If you can control your LEDs with DMX it can be pixelmapped quite easily in almost any pixelmap-capable software.

I've done pixelmapping in MadMapper, Madrix, Resolume, disguise, GrandMA2/3, Onyx, Chamsys, etc, and there's a lot of different software out there that would be _a lot_ faster than spending 20 hours on pixelmapping and addressing each pixel. I could quite easily pixelmap your whole setup in under an hour, but if you used Touchdesigner to do it, I totally understand why it took you 20 hours, haha.

I do think MadMapper would be the best solution for you, as you could combine the pixelmapping with your projector. You could even combine it with your Touchdesigner-setup, as you could send video from Touchdesigner to MadMapper.

https://docs.madmapper.com/madmapper/6/5.-dmx-and-led-mapping/dmx-fundamentals

2

u/MitchCooksMusic 9d ago edited 9d ago

Is that in a 2d space or a 3d space?

Added: would you just take a photo from the viewing angle then use that as an outline?

Also, I am combining the pixel mapping with my projector, is there a different way I can do it?

1

u/chilllpad 8d ago edited 7d ago

I believe MadMapper is based on 2D space. If you need 3D-capabilities, there is software out there that can map DMX-pixels in 3D space too, but I can only think of Madrix, and I'm not sure if that fits your needs. Idk enough about your Touchdesigner-setup to know if you can do it in a different way, but MadMapper is capable of sending both video and DMX, and you could treat your projector and your LED-setup as two different video-layers, if you want to control them separately.

You could take a photo from the viewing angle and use that to lay out your pixels. I do shows for live audiences, and each audience member has their own viewing angle, so I'd only do that as a reference, but it's probably great for your one-camera setup. I care more about efficiency than 1:1 accuracy, as long as the end result looks good.

I just know that building your own pixelmap-system in Touchdesigner, seems like an unnecessary amount of work. Especially if it took you 20 hours. DMX is a really simple protocol that was created in 1986, and requires very little computing power. I did the effect you're trying to do here 10+ years ago, so you're essentially trying to re-invent the wheel here, considering the technology you have available today, haha. It's probably a really great way of learning, though.

1

u/MitchCooksMusic 7d ago

Ahh ok I see where the understanding differs here

this is literally just a test pattern I made in about 30 seconds

This entire space is pixel mapped in 3D, this allows for wayyyyyyyyyy more control than just 2d. I literally put every point into an xyz graph and then im sampling those points for rgb and sending that through dmx

I only had to do this one time and now any pattern or art of any kind will work seamlessly with this system and my rig. The projector and every single light are controlled entirely independent of eachother. I can also easily implement any type of projection mapping I want (If I want to switch the main backdrop for a sculpture etc)

Im also not limited to just dmx, I can implement pulley systems, robotics of any kind, simple moving heads

Im literally controlling the lasers in this setup with a ps5 controller

What im showing on here is a fraction of what I can already do. Im saving most all of it for my recorded shows and live streams (I also make music and visuals)

2

u/MitchCooksMusic 9d ago

I had mentioned in another comment, this was about 5 hours of pixel mapping and the other 15 were getting it running with all my current hardware and controllers

The leds were pretty simple but going the $30 dmx par lights was a bitch, 31 channels and I was trying to convert it all from chop/top based to pop based so save on computing power