teamworkpracticesblog

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On Wednesday me and Karina worked on VVVV after she found a way to make the button work for a single quad and file texture. However, after a few hours of working, we came across another problem. We cannot work out how VVVV can select a single value out of a list of them so that the software can work out that if one of the file textures are chosen, it will then create another action.

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The presentation on Friday went rather well. We managed to get the car projection aligned up with the actual model almost perfectly. Even though the projection and the GUI still didn’t work together, they worked very well separately. We had some positive feedback from our classmates. 

The next step is to not get the GUI properly created in VVVV so that we can try it again as a whole working prototype.

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On a whim Karina asked the problem in the VVVV problem in the hope that someone could help. The answers were helpful and thankfully she was able to more onto the next stage in actually creating a the GUI in VVVV.

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I took over creating the GUI in animate from Karina so that she could focus on trying to figure out the button node in VVVV - which we are still struggling on - so that it will be ready for Friday. 

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For Friday when we are going to be presenting our idea so far, we decided it would be a good idea to create a ‘set’ using white foam-board which will help to focus the projection onto the car and also to create the showroom feel

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Because we are going to be giving the customers the choice to customise the wheel rims, I took the images of the ones they use at Porsche and tidies them up so that we can use them in our projection as well

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Attempt 2 at projecting onto car model

The next day we managed to get hold of a mini projector with a VGA cable so we decided to try projecting again. In between the two days I took another photo of the car at a different angle because we thought that the angle we had tried the day before was the cause of the problem. I then used the colour picker in Photoshop to make each individual colour that Porsche supplies on their website. We then used these to test the projection again.

It went better than the day before, but we still found a problem with matching the projection to the model perfectly. What we decided to do for the next day was for Karina to take home the model of the car and the projector and measure exactly the hight of where the projector will be in relation to the car model, and take another picture in the exact same spot, so in theory it would match up perfectly.

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Attempt 1 at projecting onto the car model

What we did was take a picture of the car at an angle, put it onto Photoshop so we could crop the image to just create a mask of the car. Then imported that into VVVV as a file texture into the renderer and then used the dual screen mode to then project said renderer onto the car.

The problem we had was that we could not get the projector and the renderer to line up with the model of the car at all, it always kept distorting too much one way or the other.

For this attempt we were using a larger projector as the mini one we had borrowed from the loan store hadn’t got a VGA cable which we required needed.

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Crisis Control

The issue Karina has been having with the buttons in VVVV is still ongoing, therefore we had to discuss a way that we are going to get around it and create a GUI in another software. We decided that the best course of action would be to use Adobe Animate to create a wizard of oz prototype, so that we have two working parts, the GUI in Animate and the projection in VVVV. Even though both of these elements won’t be able to work together, they will both be working and will demonstrate easily the concept that we have.

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We visited the 3D model design students and one of the students were kind enough to let us borrow their work for us to practice projecting onto.

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And another one

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Another useful page

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A helpful page that I found for projection mapping 

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We have been trying to work out the best way to create the model of the car in VVVV (or other software). We are stuck between using a 2D photograph in which we just edit in photoshop to create each customisation option, or to use a 3D model that we can insert into the software and do the same thing. 

I came across the software called ReconstructMe in which you can use a Kinect to recreate a 3D model of a real object. I thought that this could be useful if we choose the second option.

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Looking for alternatives

At this point with the deadline getting closer, we were really having to think of potential alternatives to using VVVV because the uni computers are still not letting us use the software, and Karina is still stuck on the button issue that I mentioned in one of my previous posts. 

We began to look into different types projection mapping software that we could use as an alternative, as at the moment it doesn’t look like we can find a way around VVVV. 

One software that we found was HeavyM, its free and apparently popular in the industry (https://heavym.net/en/). So we will look more into this over the weekend to see if it could work as a quick alternative.

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For over a week, the computers at uni were coming up with this error message when we tried to open VVVV. We were planning to start trying to connect a projector to the computer in order to work on how we are going to projection map using VVVV. Th problem we faced, apart from the obvious, was that we could use VVVV on Karina’s tablet, however she didn’t have a port to connect a projector, but we could connect a projector to the uni computers but VVVV didn’t want to cooperate.