DiPiVJ - Video Tutorials

Now we are going to check out the built-in projection mapping tools by heading over to the Mapping tab.

At the top we have our layers. A layer is one surface you are projecting onto, and right now we have one called Layer 1. The eye on the left hides a layer without deleting it, and the arrows on the right change their stacking order.

Just underneath is the slice. The slice is the part of your incoming picture that this layer shows. There is an X and a Y slider to move it around, a width and a height slider to size it, and a row of buttons beside each one to step a value a little or a lot. 

We will come back to this once we have something mapped. The first thing I am going to do is toggle our test pattern by pressing this button. That gives us a clean grid to aim with instead of whatever is playing .I am going to make sure our Warp, four corner, toggle is selected, and then I am going to toggle Warp On so we can start using warp mapping. Immediately our corner pin controls turn violet to show that warp mapping is active. Now I can start dragging those corner pins to pull our output into the shape I want.

I will simulate mapping one surface of a box. I am dragging each corner out to meet a corner of the face I am projecting onto. The output updates live while I drag, so I am not guessing. I can watch the test pattern land on the surface and keep adjusting until the grid sits square on it. Take your time with this part. Getting the four corners close is most of the work, and we will clean up the rest in a moment.

 If we need more control than the four corner pins allow, we can also create grids with the two by two, three by three, and four by four toggles just above. With a grid turned on you get interior points as well as corners, which is what you want on a surface that curves or bows rather than lying flat. For now I am going to leave this on Off. Instead, I am going to go up to the top and click Add to add another layer. Now you can see we have Layer 1 and Layer 2 listed here, with Layer 2 currently selected. 

Everything below the layer list applies to whichever layer is highlighted, so from here on I am working on Layer 2, and Layer 1 stays exactly as I left it.For this layer I am also going to toggle Warp On, and I will map another face of the box. The one turned away from the first, so the two layers together wrap the corner.

Just underneath our corner pin area you can see we have Fine Nudge buttons.I can either select the corner pin I want by clicking its anchor indicator, or I can click the matching button here in the Fine Nudge controls. I will choose the bottom right to select the bottom right corner pin. Now I have these directional controls to move that pin by one pixel or by ten. This is for the fine control that dragging cannot give you, and it is usually the difference between a projection that nearly fits and one that actually lands. I will demonstrate by nudging a few pixels with the one-pixel buttons. 

Let us go back up above to the slice controls. I will click on Layer 2 so that we are working on that layer.Remember the slice is the part of the incoming picture this layer is showing. 

Right now it is showing all of it. I am going to bring the X and the Y sliders in to move that region, and then pull the width and the height down, so this layer only takes a window out of the frame instead of the whole thing.

Watch the box while I do it. Layer 1 is still showing the entire picture, and Layer 2 is now showing just that window. That is what lets two faces carry two different things out of the same video.Now I will click back on Layer 1. 

Its slice is still the full frame, but the shape we warped it into is not that shape.We can hit this Fit to Shape button to resize the slice to the shape of the warp automatically, so the picture fills the surface without stretching. To demonstrate I will do that now for Layer 1.

If you want to start a layer's slice over instead, Reset Slice puts it back to the full frame.

There is one more thing this panel does. Beside the Warp, four corner, button there is a Mask button, and these are two different jobs. Warp changes the shape of your output. A mask hides part of it. 

I will press Mask to switch what I am editing, and then toggle Mask On. Where the grid choices were, we now have mask shapes. Quad, circle, triangle, and octagon. I will choose circle. Now I can drag these handles to put the mask where I want it, and the Fine Nudge buttons work here the same way they did on the corner pins. If I check Invert Mask, it flips which side is hidden. So instead of hiding what is outside the shape, it hides what is inside it. This is how you keep light off of something you do not want lit, like a doorway or a window in the middle of the surface you are projecting on.

Okay, now let us turn our test pattern off by clicking this bar that says Test Pattern On, and we can see our actual projection mapping.

To delete a layer, just click the red X to the right of its name. I will go ahead and delete Layer 2 now. If you only wanted to undo that last move, the Undo button up here steps you back one change at a time. And to clear everything and start over, press Reset Mapping on the upper right.

Next we will talk about the Network tab.