A slight departure from the Processing fodder usually dropping here on CDM Labs. This post contains resources for the Game On projection mapping project – call for artists here – and will be updated as new information and materials come to hand.

General Instructions

The Game On Launch Party is on the 22nd of November, so submissions should be… submitted, by the 19th of November.
Keep your submissions between 30 seconds to 2 minutes long. The event only goes for a couple of hours, so we can’t really showcase your epic 3 hour VJ mix. Sorry. Slightly longer or shorter is fine. Considerably longer videos will be brutally edited by Jaymis, who is Brutal.
For best results, content should be delivered in 25FPS, PAL format.
Projection Mapping content should be high-contrast, as the project doesn’t have enough budget for more than 5000 lumens worth of projector, which means that fine detail and subtle colours will be lost.
Audio isn’t required. You may deliver video with audio, but it won’t be heard.

Video Delivery

Videos should be delivered at the highest quality your connection can muster. There’s no need for full uncompressed videos, but high bitrate H264 or MJPEG videos would be great.
My favorite method for delivery would be vimeo. Upload your video there, make sure that “Allow other people to download the source video.” is checked, and then email me with a link. If you’d like your video to be private, add me as a contact and you can make it so only I can view and download the video.

If you’re not in to vimeo, give me an email and we’ll work something out.

Resources

The lovely and talented Karl Kwasny has been awesome enough to provide us with some gaming-themed illustrations for our animation and remixing pleasure.

I’ve cropped these to separate layered PSD files (so you can tweak the colours and line art etc. if you’d like), and created transparent PNGs as well. Bargain!

Game On Characters (5.5MB Zip)

These images are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. You’re free to use these resources for remixing for this project, and for your own non-commercial use. However, derivatives must also be released under the same license, and must contain attribution to the original source.

Cloud Projections

For those who’d like to be involved, but don’t have the time to go all custom and projection mappy, we’re going to have a series of screens throughout the venue displaying work from international visualists. The screens will be shaped like the “8Bit Cloud” in the image below.

If you’d like to submit any general video content, we will be able to mask it to be displayed in these screens. However, if you’d like to create some content specifically designed for the screens, I’ve made some templates for you:

Game On Cloud Template (25KB Zip)
This zip file contains a transparent PNG file which you can use as a mask over your video, or some layered photoshop documents if you’d like to be a bit more advanced.
Final videos should be delivered in the slightly bizarre size of 760×467 pixels. Use the template as a guide and you can’t go wrong.

Projection Mapping

This is a little more complex. As we couldn’t be guaranteed that the position of the projector on the launch night would match the position on our test run, we’ve had to mostly scrap our plans for a “real” 3D mapping setup. Most of the work will be a “2.5D” mapping, where flat videos are warped in 3D space.

We’re also constrained by our reasonably paltry (for the space and ambient light) 5000 lumen projector. So your content should be reasonably high-contrast, and colours should be bright. Fine detail and subtle colours are likely to get lost, so put the subtlety-brush down and grab your vividity-mallet.

We’re still working on getting the precise dimensions for the flat templates, and they’ll be posted here when completed. However, if you’re going to be super advanced and create something in 3D space which can be later exported as 2D faces, then we have 3D models of the space available for you:
Game On Mapping 3D Models (120KB Zip)

Warning! You’re on your own with these models. The dimensions are correct, but we’re not certain of the camera/projector viewpoint and angle. So your animation will either need to be exported as flat “texture” videos, or you’ll need to change your scene camera to fit the viewpoint of our 2D templates (when they’re finished). So, going all-3D is probably a little risky. Should be fun though! Good luck with that. Give me an email if you have any questions or concerns.

Updated Mapping Models

Apologies 3Ders for the delay. I finally have the mapping templates ready from our test run at the venue.

SLQ Map Release Version (630KB Zip).

This file contains original, editable .AI and .EPS templates with all layers and bricks separated, as well as exported PSD and PNG versions for people who just want to work with the shapes.

There are also 2 jpgs entitled “Stairs-explained” and “Wall-explained”, which provide a legend as to which bits of the template go where on the wall.

Finally, the file “SLQ-Map-2D-Template.png” is an output from our session at the library with VVVV. This file is in the native resolution of the projector we’re using – 1024×768. So you can see that the templates we’ve provided are much higher resolution than our final output. We’ve done this to give you as much precision as possible when creating your videos, but we don’t expect you to deliver videos 3000 pixels wide.

Usage of the Mapping Models

This is where things get a little free-form. We know that everyone has their own workflow and techniques, so we don’t want to confine contributors to a partilcular format. If you’d like to pre-warp and render out your work to fit the dimensions in the “2D Template” file, that should work fine. Otherwise if you’d like to render out flat files based on the “Stairs Section” and “Wall Section” templates, we’ll be able to map these to the wall ourselves, and probably get a slightly higher quality result.

Likewise, don’t feel you need to be producing content for the entire surface. If you’d like to just focus on a couple of sections of the wall, or even create content for a single rectangular surface, feel free. Please get in touch and keep us updated on your progress, so we know where things are going when you come to deliver your files.

Final Delivery

As mentioned above, we’ll try to be as flexible as possible with delivery. Aim for high quality files, but the final output will be warped to fit inside a 1024×768 rectangle, so there’s no need to waste time rendering and uploading at full-HD resolution, unless this particularly turns you on.

I would also suggest rendering and uploading a draft version of your work, so we can check to ensure that it’s going to fit with what we’re doing, and that you haven’t made any glaring geometrical errors.

Collaboration and Progress

If you have any questions or ideas you’d like to discuss publicly, use the comments of this post. Similarly, if you have any materials or resources you’d like to share for others to remix or use, feel free to post them as well.

More information: Game On tag on CDMotion.