blog.andy-coates.com

Twenty Twenty Six so far!

Posted on August 7, 2026 by andy

Again, with all the best intentions of doing a regular update to the blog, I have failed. I do wonder if its a sign of the times, getting distracted by things and time passing by us. So here i am in an endeavour to do a mega blog update to cover not everything but some chunky interesting gigs this year.

Emily, Andy, Adam, Dan, Chris, Ben, Pete, Jack

A fair bit has been happening this year so far so I’ve decided to do a post about all the exciting things that have happened in the last 6 month. The year started again with the Joy Awards 2026, the show was in the same building again this year and everyone had the lay of the land now and venue familiarity.

Again we had a load of LED screen to play with this year I spent a lot of time in the planning & preproduction as things changed and evolved, this really helped make it a smooth time onsite. It was almost he same team as last year with all of us working for Chris, Jack was main programmer, Emily was looking after content wrangling with her amazing file kitty software that really helped speed up everything. Adam and myself were supporting Jack with programming and Pete was the glue between us and all the other departments. Also not forgetting Ben and Dan from QED who supplied the system and did an outstanding job onsite keeping everything running smooth as butter

Our control room was packed full of screens and I think since last year we’ve cracked the best layout for all of us and everyone’s workstations to be able to work efficiently. This year the outside air quality was really bad so I ended up buying an air purifier for our cabin that Jack aptly named Airy.

After a great 2 weeks in the desert we were all back home and I was off to help Graymatter as they were doing a projection install at media city Manchester. Dan booked me to come with my laser scanner to get an accurate model of the surfaces been projected on.

When I arrived onsite I got to work scanning the different areas which required several scans to collect al the data we needed. I’ve had the Faro focus s70 for a few years now and have built up an incredibly good workflow to generate a clean accurate UV’d mesh for the media server with a fast turnaround time.

Whilst the projector’s were going in I was finalising the mesh and line-up grids to put into d3. When making mesh & grids for projection line-up I always think about how its going to work when using Quick Cal in d3. With all the scan data I also utilize any parts the building geometry that can be used as reference points to help with line-up.

The lower blocks of the building really lent itself well to projection and as the faces had loads of super useful reference points I included these int he mesh and line-up grid which made line-up from d3 using Quick Cal incredibly fast. It lined up so well and quickly that there was almost no warp required to pull it in.

I was only around to line-up the lower bits and then Ash tackled the tower. The whole team did a really nice job of the install in absolutely Baltic conditions as there was a lot of large projectors used which needed protecting from the elements too.

I very rarely do any work in the north east so when my good friend Iain from Multicord AV asked if I would come and program on a local gig I jumped at the chance. This was the comeback of a gig that was last on in 2020 called Sunday For Sammy which is a gig to raise funds for the Sunday for Sammy foundation helping provide opportunities for kids to get into performing arts

It was really nice to be doing something local after many years and also catch up with friends I’ve not seen in a long time. It was the first year they were cutting live camera to the main screen so I put together a flexible system that for running programmed visuals to screen plus on the fly band content and love camera. It was a great gig for a really good cause and an absolute pleasure to be on it with lots of good folk.

I was going to add in the BTS comeback gig into this blogpost but after going through the photos i have and notes on the gig and the planning running up to the gig I decided its totally worth its own post. Instead here’s a picture of Pete looking very happy as we were working with the local team late at night.

Late 2025 Nevil form Pixway got in touch as they were looking after the project setup and install for the 2026 – 2027 lake stage show at Bregenz . In classic Lake Stage fashion this was a large spectacular set which was to be projected on as a setting for the backdrop of the opera La Traviata. I’ve worked with the Bregenz team and the Pixway team in the past so was more than glad to be asked to help with this years production.

This year the set was built to represent a huge broken mirror serving as the backdrop and the stage. The set was really well constructed and finished with a printed viny on the surface to give the look of a mirror but also be able to projected projected light like a convectional screen. In addition the centre part of the set moved, there were loads of axis of automation that moved the “shards” inwards to create a space for a huge black sphere to come out on a huge automated arm creating a huge reverse shattered mirror effect. I arrived at Bregenz checked into the hotel then went to meet Paul who I’d not seen in AGES. The theatre were having some drinks outside to celebrate part of the staging finally being finished and they has a blackboard for everyone involved to sign which we both signed.

It was really nice to see many familiar faces at the drinks from my visit there a couple of years ago helping Luke Halls studio with the projection element on Madame Butterfly. My roll on this was to help Pixway with laser scans verify that all the automated axes rotated and landed correct to the provided rigged 3d model thy had been provided with. Paul had a custom build of d3 that allowed him to take in a rigged FBX model and push scaled automation data into the model so it followed the real world automation movement. Prior to coming onsite I proposed to get the real world data with 3 scans from the central position Open, Closed & Mid, I then repeated the process from other scan locations with careful logging of which scan was which. This meant that I could use the initial 3 scans as the perfect anchor point as it was never moved and then add in the additional scans to each the Open, Closed & Mid sets so we had 3 separate overall scan data but they all shared the same exact datum. Below are some screenshots form the recap project.

I was onsite for a couple of days to make sure I could get all the scan data I needed to do an accurate reconstruction. After a day of scanning from multiple positions and processing the data I could see that some of the lower shards weren’t getting picked up very well because of angle of attack from the scanner. The data was usable but I knew we could do better so I pitched the idea of taking the scanner three quarters up the crane tower to get a few more additional scans and permission was immediately granted.

The following morning I met Nino at the venue and he took me around to the jetty which ran around the back of the stage. I didn’t realise it but the only way to get to the crane was via a tiny tin boat so I got the scanner and stand off the jetty into the boat and we made our 20 second (probably less) journey to the crane base where I had to put the scanner and sand on to the concrete ballast plinth then shimmy up off the rocky boat. It was all pretty fast and I was full of adrenaline as that morning I was just expecting a small bridge to be there from the stage to the crane base. I think I went about five story’s up on the crane to get the optimal shot for the scanner with a bit of creative leg positioning.

I was only going to do three scans but decided to do a second set of three from a couple of levels down as more data is better than less and with this opportunity it would be silly not to. After almost 2 hour up the crane scanning and repositioning the scanner I was back down with the kit and I called on the radio to get picked up off crane island. It was a different gent that picked me up and when we got to the jetty he insisted I come join the crew for a light lunch which was gladly welcomed. I cant remember the names of everyone but the whole team were incredibly welcoming and friendly and had an amazing selection of local cheeses meats and bread it was a great final day. After lunch I got the scan data off the scanner and onto my laptop to verify that the captures were good and that they would merge into the base scans. Once these were all good I said my goodbyes and thankyous to everyone and headed to the train station so start the journey home.

Once I got ack to the studio I properly processed the scans back in the studio and did extensive clean-up on the three scan sets as these were getting handed over to the original cad person to check and modify pivot and as built positions mainly for when the structure was open. These are some images Paul sent me as they were tweaking the axis to get the projection sticking to the shards. Its quite a feat to track compound axis like this with so may variables in play, below is a press image from the Festspielhaus website, it was really nice to be involved with this production.

Only a couple of weeks after getting back from Bregenz I was on my way to Vienna to join the team again for the Eurovision Song Contest 2026. Basically on the whole production it was the same team as Basel with a few additions for stage managing this year. It was really nice to get onsite and see so many familiar faces and also some people we hadn’t seen in quite a while. Once again CT Northern Europe were providing screens, control and all of infrastructure for this across site and they had our room set up for us upon our arrival, they are such a good team and great bunch of folk.

We had quite a tight turnaround from arriving onsite to being ready for first tech rehearsals, Luke and Emily already had a load programmed offline in the preproduction week but we needed to get this al in the system and check everything. In addition there were quite a few prop pieces this yere that we were driving the LED with video. I needed to see the as-built set and then tweak the corresponding UV, we were supplied with some plans of the props but not all of them were exactly to the drawing which sometimes happens.

The set was still being finished when we arrived too but the teams worked hard to get it all finished and we were up and running for the first tech rehearsal with time to spare. I’m not going to go over the details of this years Eurovision as it is very similar to last years in terms of we spend an extraordinary amount of time in rehearsals, updating content, checking against camera shots, and repeat. It was really nice to have some developers from d3 come to site for a week at a time which really was invaluable. Another tool which was invaluable was something Emily has been working on for the last year which is a content checking tool that checks verifies and distributes the content to the servers. Not only that but there are notes options per piece of content where programmers can log errors of feedback to on central point where producers and the content houses can respond to. It’s such a good system and Emily is constantly updating it, here’s a link to File Kitty

Luke, Joe & myself had been had been to this kebab stand close to the venue a couple of times and promised to take James there when he came out to do a dev week. I can honestly say its probably the best kebab and falafel wrap (separate occasions) I’ve ever had, we all let the kebab stand after eating it very happy that day.

After just over a month together working closely for many hours a day in a small dark room everyone was till smiling and happy to hang out together which I think speaks volumes of having the right team chemistry. Some days aren’t always smooth and patience does get frayed but on these occasions everyone recognised these moments and discussed them after the event which is so important on gigs like.

I think that’s a good place to end, its been a while since I’ve updated the blog and have forgotten how enjoyable it is going over old memories and documenting them. I’ve no idea who actually reads this but I hope over the last 16 year’s of writing it its made a positive impact on some folk.

Andy

Posted in cinema4d, d3, LED, Uncategorized, Work | Leave a comment

Boomerang, a projection planning tool for C4D

Posted on October 31, 2025 by andy

I’ve decided to release my cinema 4d projection planning tool called BOOMERANG that I’ve been using for quite a few years now to the community. The base of this started with a project shared by my friend Luke where he had built the core of the projector in Espresso in c4d and from there I’ve added a few things and wrote an export script so the projection plan can be exported as a csv and imported directly into disguise.

My workflow is generally like this, the client sends over a 3d model or a plan etc in some format, CAD, rhino3d, FBX or scan data. I then process the files if need be and then 3d and bring it into c4d setting my own datum point, scale and rotation to match the d3workflow. From here I then setup the props and screens so I have an accurate 3d model of what the real world setup is going to be. Within this 3d world I can do everything I need in a unified workspace and that includes projection planning with Boomerang, I used to use mapping matter but it slowed down the process exporting and importing into the browser now I have everything under one hood ad full quick control of all parameters.

The tool isn’t perfect and only gives a LUX reading at the target point, the surface reflection must be taken into account and basically a real world knowledge about how the light works when projected on different surfaces at different angles is very advantageous. I’ve built it for my own use and aim to explain my usage of it here. The above image is based on the project from the planning for Carmen at Bregenz with LHS back in 2017 updated for 2025. To make it a bit more clearer Ill start with a simple 2 x projector setup to explain the workings of Booomerang.

In this example we have a simple setup with a 2 x projector blend on a wide’ish screen. Each projector group consists of parts, the projector body and the target both which can be moved with the conventional C4D widgets.

My workflow is to position the projector to where i think the physical position will be based off the received CAD, and then using the 4 split view I move around the look-at point to get the coverage I want.

Positioning and pointing things is all good but the real juicy part is when you select the projector in the objects window and select the USER DATA tab in the attributes window. This allows you to set the following parameters highlighted in green below.

This all should be self explanatory in terms of input data, knowing the surface reflection is a bit of a black art when projecting on non conventional surfaces so this requires a bit of prior knowledge in what works and what doesn’t. The most important and useful part of this rig is the ability to know what the resulting lux will be based on all of your inputs.

IMPORTANT : The lux is only calculated in a flat plane from the projector exactly where the look-at point is. So if you have a setup where the projector is quite off axis to the surface (like the image below) then there will varying degrees of brightness, the further the light has to travel the darker the resulting lux, and the shorter the distance the brighter the resulting lux

Once you have your coverage with a projector off-axis like this, it is good practice to temporary move the look-at point to the extremes (the resulting dark area) and make sure that lux reading is bright enough in the fall-off region. Again, I cant stress this enough, this tool is great to help with planning and PJ coverage in a 3d space but also a good understanding of how projected light behaves when hitting various surfaces is a must.

STARTING A NEW PROJECT

At the end of this post I’ll link to the boomerang simple setup c4d project which you can use to copy and paste projectors into your own c4d project. The only real prerequisite is that your project scale is set to meters and its usually a good idea to have your units set to meters too.

You can either use the simple setup and build your study within there or you can simply copy and paste the projectors (the whole null group) from the simple setup into your project, the only important part as noted above is that the project is set to meters.

Exporting to the Mapping Matter format

Within the download there is also a python script that exports the projectors to the mapping matter format for ease of use to import into d3. To use this, open the script editor and locate the python file. Before you can export you will need to delete all the lights in your scene else it will fail, I’m still figuring out a way around this.
When you hit export you will be presented with the save to dialogue box to save wherever you like, from here you can import the projectors straight into d3 with the usual method.

Here is a link to download where you should download the whole thing as a zip and then extract, please let me know how you get on with this tool in the comment or drop me an email.

DOWNLOAD BOOMERANG 1.0.0

Posted in cinema4d, d3, Projection Mapping | Tagged c4d, d3, projection, Projection Mapping | Leave a comment

ESC Final Weeks SHOWTIME!!!

Posted on August 20, 2025 by andy

The first 2 Eurovision blog posts I did onsite in the downtimes between tech and rehearsals and thought I was going to continue the trend but in all honesty there wasn’t a whole load to blog about. Once we got into rehearsals and shows, we were very much into groundhog day territory repeating the same processes every day of many many rehearsals, updating content and programming based off client feedback and repeating until showtime. To make this final Eurovision 2025 post condensing almost three weeks worth of work and play into a single post based from my collection of photos and memories from the gig.

For remote content delivery we decided to use MASV for file transfers which is a high speed secure file transfer service. Each country had its own portal and password protected login page with a short form to fill in to identify the packages of content. Once a package was uploaded it was then automatically downloaded at our end to the main content ingestion machine, it was also pushed to Frame for review by the contest team and once done we got a slack notification. Onsite we had a dedicated 10gb connection to our room provided by the venue which we often saturated as MASV will use the full bandwidth. It was such a great workflow and we were never once missed a rehearsal slot waiting for downloads to complete.

During our stay in Basel we had 2 full days off on separate occasions, the first one Luke and myself joined some of the lighting team and went for a float down the Rhine an on our second day off we decided to take the train an hour and a half south to Lucerne. This was a wonderful day off away from screens where we hung out by the lake drinking beers playing uno on the grass with the occasional dip in the water.

We were staying at the Senevita apartments for our time in Basel which was a really nice apartment, 15 mins walk to the venue. The Senevita is also an assisted living complex for the elderly and it was nice saying hello to the residents in the morning as they were going for breakfast and we were going to work. Most of the elevators int he complex had pictures of flowers in them but one was empty from the time we arrived there so we decided to print a picture of Sam’s dog Norman for the residents to enjoy. Unfortunately it was removed the following day but it was fun whilst it lasted.

Maybe about two or three weeks into being onsite Gustav & Philip created CTFM which was a webpage linked to APIs where the whole production could put in three song requests a day and there was dedicated time slots each day for these requests to be played. For the rest of the time there was a fantastic radio station of songs curated by Nora. If you wanted to listen to CTFM you just had to ask coms help at Riedel and they would add it to the panel.

As we got closet to the show days there were more ducks appearing and they weren’t coming form us this time. The camera departments had an addition of a little baby duck tot he family when doing sync checks, it was a joy to see everyone getting in on this.

This is probably a good place to wrap up this final ESC post, its was a fantastic gig to be on with such a good bunch of folk. We had three very clean broadcasts all down to the hard work of the massive team involved.

Us and just some of team CT after the final show, high spirits and smiley faces.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged basel, broadcast, ducks, esc, eurovision | Leave a comment

ESC Week Two

Posted on June 2, 2025 by andy

Its been another busy week here completing all of the stand-in rehearsals for each countries delegation. This is essentially rehearsing each song with stand in dancers so all technical departments can get everything programmed and feed back to each country how everything is going to look before they arrive.

The whole production is using LiveEdit for the show which is a fantastic tool to be able to immediately review rehearsals, take notes and put assets in the timeline so that everyone is reading from the same page. Julien the creator of live edit is onsite with his team and have and have been really supportive of bugs we’ve reported and improvements that we have suggested.

This week we completed 15 days of beige as that’s what the catering has been like since being here. All of the food on offer has been pretty heavy, stodgy and lacking flavor, when people have had time to leave the venue we have been going across the road to coop to get some healthy alternatives but sometimes because of time constraints we’ve ended up doing “functional eating”. Tim Did manage to get a sandwich option added to catering so weren’t constantly being offered stodge but that ended up being pretty dry and disappointing too.

On a more up beat note I bought 100 tiny squeaky ducks from amazon that got delivered earlier in the week and and we have been gifting them to pretty much everyone in the venue We’ve pretty much ran out of ducks for everyone already and have another 100 on the way this week.

We use so many various software tools on this job and one of them has been so invaluable and also made buy our good friend Andy Briggs. This tool is called Content Check and is a lightweight player for choking a single NotchLC file or if there are 2 versions you need to compare you can drag them onto the player and AB compare them to see what the exact difference is between version_A and version_B. Its so quick and easy to use and much more useful than d3 preview. Once Briggsy has a good place to download it from I’ll stick it into a blog post.

Its been a busy week with long days of contest rehearsals, show rehearsals and host rehearsals squeezed into generally a 10 hour day. Luke and Emily have been busy programming and responding to rehearsals. Sam has been interfacing with the delegations and sending back content notes to the countries and I’ve been wrangling the content and helping support everyone when needed. In this whole process everyone has made some nice onsite tools to help with workflow. My project was a way of recording the incoming OSC values from Sams faders that allows him to ride the levels of the screens in rehearsals.

This meant after a rehearsal if the screen levels had been adjusted and looked good we had a record of what they were with a timecode stamp so these could be hard programmed in the timeline after. We’ve only had to reference it a couple of times but its been very useful to have the data.

Luke has built a complex companion profile for each of our stations Streamdeck’s that’s handing all of audio switching for our editor machines. This also allows us to immediately pull up the right track in the reaper session and switch live edit to the right track for much quicker programming and checking which saves a lot of time over the many hours that the guys are programing.

As part of the workflow receiving content and getting it into the system we run everything though a program called Media Conch that has a profile in it that runs multiple checks on the video files to make sure they confirm to the correct specifications before we push them to the servers for programming. Any failures we report back to the content teams so they can resupply to the correct spec. Currently this is a manual process when content comes in and Emily is working on a script that auto checks the files in Media Conch CLI when they get dropped into the delivery folder. This then sends a notification of arrival and of the file and auto checks the file against the conch profile and sends another notification if its passed or failed and why. Its currently a testing WIP and almost ready to be used fully in the workflow.

Sam has been working with Brigsy to develop a windows app for the Behringer fader wing that basically turns it into a hardware OSC fader wing. Rather than use the USB midi that the wing outputs the app natively interfaces with the desk via a windows machine and sends out OSC. You can also update the labels on the hardware digital scribble strips as well as configuring all of the OSC send parameters.

Its been a steady week in tech, prior to each of the country delegates turning to rehearse up we have stand in dancers which allows all department’s to run through each performance with timecode and get all things creative/technical correct before the delegations arrive.

Overall its been a very good week but the team have been battling with PTP working reliably on the the VFC cards which has been the elephant in the room. The dev’s at disguise have been good at offering firmware updates but we’ve had to draw the line as were trying to program a show as well as run rehearsals and we cant be sure that these updates aren’t going to screw current programming which some previous ones had and we needed to roll back.

This week Luke Halls Studio also arrived who we all know well and are doing all the show content and some of the delegations. Its great to be working with friends and a very shit-hot studio. Luke had brought an egg cooker which we got gifted to us and we made good use of it supplying boiled eggs to everyone who wanted one. It was a big hit, though most people, when they found out we had an egg cooker said “why the f’k do you have an egg cooker…. ok yeah I’d love an egg” It was amazing how many people would just drop by for an egg now and again.

Photo by : Ralph Larmann featuring Ulf, Gustavo & Rune

I cannot stress how good its been working with CT Northern Europe with an amazing team headed by Karl Wigenius looking after systems, LED, projection and making our control multi-viewers exactly how we wanted. Philip managed to implement on our control room dashboard screen that it would display country flag when that delegates song timecode was playing and when it wasn’t it would display a picture of Sams dog Norman. Everyone was incredibly knowledgeable with the right balance of professionalism and also having a laugh when the time is right.

That wraps the post for this week, there is an incredibly good team of very smart people here onsite across the whole production and its a joy to work with everyone which helps with the challenges encountered.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged basel, contest, ducks, eurovision, projection, song, video, work | Leave a comment

ESC Week One

Posted on May 22, 2025 by andy

Its the end of week one in Basel on ESC2025 and I’m aiming to keep a weekly blog of the going on’s of what we have been up to as the screens department. I’m not going to be publishing this until the show is over so as not to reveal any secrets of the show. A while back I got a call of my good friend Sam to see if I was interested in joining him as part of the video screens team and when I heard who was going to be involved I checked my diary to make sure I was free and said yes!

Luke, Emily, Sam, Karl, Joe outside our our screens control room

Fast forward a few month’s and I was heading to Basel to meet Sam, Luke & Emily to start our first day onsite at St. Jakobshalle and meet the team from CT Sweden who were delivering all the screen , projection and server infrastructure. Sam had been in many meetings with CT Sweden for several weeks before and specced the system so when we arrived onsite everything was ready and setup for us. The guys had done a great job of getting the system up and running to to a point where we could push our show file over and get setup to start receiving content and building a show. We had already spent a week at Neg Earth with the lighting team before coming to Basel so we already had quite a fleshy show file to hit the ground running on arrival.

Day 1 was us getting our personal machines setup and connected into the system, getting to know our new collages and generally getting bedded in ready for a month of making a show. Luke & Emily were in charge of programming, Sam was Screens producer and client facing and I was associate screens producer supporting Sam and looking after content wrangling, technical back end things.

For the set design we had some sculpted mountains left and right of the stage that were to be projected on. Prior to coming to site had made a preliminary model from the CAD plans as a rough guide for the content teams but as the mountain surface was basically sculpted by hand we needed an accurate as built model.

CT had brought their Leica BLK lidar scanner to scan the mountains but as I had some time and access during the day and i had brought my camera (Sony a7V) I decided to do a photogrammetry construction test which turned out so well I decided to photogram’ the whole mountain.

With around 90 photos and a little bit of tweaking of the RAW images in DXO I got a great construction result in Reality Capture shown in the image above. From here I simplified the model down to around 500k triangles and exported it with a texture as a FBX to bring into cinema. I’ve been working on this technique for a while for retopology where I take a clean uniform geometry, cut it out using the capture model as a guide and then shrink wrap the clean geo onto the high poly mesh. Its not a quick process and worth taking the time to get this right as this forms the foundation of s good lineup.

CT had spoke with disguise and they were supplying some Omnical cameras and someone to be onsite to look after this, and it was nice to see that Nicholas Defonzo was over to look after this. Once we got a clear area the cameras finally fixed solid Nicholas got a decent Omnical result

The whole thing could have been quickcal’d quite quickly but wasn’t going to step on Nicolas’s toes. I did find out that later that on emails with CT, someone at d3 had been dropping my name in endorsement using omnical unbeknown to me and I’m unhappy about it. There are several issues with using omnical on a gig like this and one of the big ones is that when a capture is in progress no-one else can use the director and work in parallel which is cumbersome and generally all the infrastructure that needs to be in place before a line-up can be achieved. I must say that when omnical does work, its really great it just takes a lot of effort to get there. I’m really happy that Nicolas was here here to look after the quirks of omnical and he’s also an all round great guy.

There’s been a huge amount of discontent with disguise for quite a while within the user community. I have no idea what’s going on with disguise but from the outside looking in it seem a bit of a mess though our interactions with them the last couple of weeks . Its been great having Joe T here as onsite support taking all of our flack and looking after bug tracking and developer communication with the delicate IPVFC cards. Were all interested to see the marketing from d3 after this to see how honest it is about their involvement.

During our time in previz at Neg we put together a workflow for content ingestion and management so we were all in the loop with new delivery’s and update’s. I started a fresh google sheet a few weeks back based on when we did Eurovision at Liverpool and once we were together we collectively made improvements and implemented ideas to make a good foundation when we got onsite in Basel. Based on the multiple tabs of different deliveries Luke made a master overview sheet that highlighted red when new content was in and any version updates. Philip who was part of the CT team looking after systems built us a great dashboard page for systems and integrated the overview page of our content tracker so we all had optics on what we had and what we didn’t.

Its been a great first week with a huge amount of work from everyone, we started the first day of stand in rehearsals today with everything going smoothly. Throughout the week we have been decorating our control room with some string lights and led tape I brought with me. Today we found a Eurovision looking doormat in the Aldi over the road so we bought it and added it to the decorations, that’s it for this week!!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged basel, Creative Technologies, ct, d3, eurovision, programming, projection, video, work | Leave a comment

Joy Awards Screens 2025

Posted on March 7, 2025 by andy

I just got back from Saudi a few weeks ago after working with Oglehog and a great team of freelancers looking after screens for the Joy Awards 2025. This was the 4th year that the event has been running and in typical Saudi style the whole production moved to a bigger and better venue. The venue for the previous years was pretty small against the needs and size of the production and this change was welcomed by everyone. This did however mean that everything was much much bigger requiring more resources and planning.

It was very early October when I got the first Rhino3d drawing for the show from Stufish and this was the beginning of the process of unpicking to get a spec together of what was technically required to deliver the creatives vision. I knew this was going to evolve over the next few months running up to the show but was enough to begin formulating a spec for the show.

How I generally tackle these things is getting a list of LED screens and surfaces that are going to be projected on and then begin extracting these elements from the current master Rhino or CAD and bring them into C4D. This is my preferred tool of choice to visualise the whole thing, do projection study’s and also retopoligise & UV modes to construct the d3 project from. Armed with the knowledge from previous years shows I had a good idea that the stage structure and general lower room design wasn’t going to change much and everything else at this stage was gong to go through several iterations before screen sizes and projections surfaces were locked in to be physically built.

This year I decided to create a Joy 25 notion page for all the information relating to screens based on the workflow created by Zach Peletz which is creating a really clear centralised place for all the information relating to screens that could be updated as and when specs changed. This was incredibly useful when trying to figure out howmany servers were needed and as things changed I would update the chart and all of the team could check the notion for the latest spec. The server table listed all the server’s the VFC cards required and the roll of each output.

Every year we have projected on to the roof of the auditorium and this year was no different. Stufish had created a lovely geometric canopy for the auditorium that was also to be projected on. With the initial design I brought it into C4D and looked at what kind of coverage we could get with limited available projector positions. I have my own custom projector rig in C4D that enables me to quickly do projection study’s and know what coverage and what kind of lux I’m going to get at the surface. The beauty of this is I don’t have to go back and fourth putting models into a separate software like mapping matter, I can do everything in the cinema project.

Eventually the projection study got handed over to CT as they had gotten the contract to provide all LED and projectors for the event. From my side I knew how I wanted the projectors laid out and coverage so I made a spec for this. After several meetings going back and fourth we settled on a compromise of coverage and locations based on budget and how little time CT had allocated to this. I wasn’t entirely happy with the projection study outcome and went over the coverage to try and get the coverage better for line-up before the kit was signed off. To speed things up onsite I made the below document for the projection team stating the exact coverage we required, lensing and physical position.

Joy25_Projection_Coverage_adc_v002 Download

Whilst I was out in Riyadh for MDL Beast , myself and Adam who was also working out there met Chris and we went to see how the mammoth stage build for the show was going in the venue and to get an idea of how the canopy which we were to project onto was going up.

It was nice to see the setup after so long looking at it virtually in cinema and rhino3d the place looked kind of smaller in real life but a bit squashed. I knew the canopy wouldn’t be exactly dimensions of the 3d but I was hoping it would be close. lightinitiative had been onsite for a while and after speaking with James most of their premade LED strips (made in the UK) fit the structure which suggested the canopy was the correct shape. From our servers we were also sending content to the LED strips based on the UV for the canopy scaled down into a 4k feed.

I knew from experience that the content for projection wouldn’t necessarily translate well onto led strips and was prepared to for a bit of experimentation to make this work. Alex Mildenhall was looking after this aspect from lighting and we were able to give him control from his MA3 of brightness saturation & contrast of our output to led. This worked really well and probably a aspect Ill put into a spec for future stuff.

It was really good to be working with Harry Dan & Ben again, legends from QED. Dan had put together a really clean flexible system which gave us the ability to throw network data around the place via the fibre shoes as and when we needed it.

It was a good few busy days after arriving on site on the 3rd January with everyone working together to get projector’s led and screens infrastructure up and running. Following a yearly theme we got a set of cheap tacky led lights up in the space to make it a bit more cosy.

After being here for a few days it was time to work on the projection plan, I had brought out my Faro scanner again this year to adjust the current model to the real-world shape and position. On day one i had dine a scan and did some initial updates to the canopy mesh but things had moved a little with pa and lighting getting rigged. Adam Power and Alex Loftie had agreed to do the overnight shift to look after projection line-up and other things that I couldn’t be achieved during the day.

Above: c4d project moving the mesh to the scan data

The initial line-up test looked promising, Andy Briggs and myself spent a couple of hours cheeking things and working with the projectionists to do some adjustments before Power and Loftie came in to do the first proper pass on the nightshift. The plan was for the guys to get a feel for stuff, then I was going to do another scan the following day with feedback from the teams findings and requests.

Over the next few days Adam and Alex did an incredible job of massaging the projection into a tight line-up. I had specified an additional set of wildcard projectors that weren’t part of the initial coverage but were there to fill shadows caused by PA and other rigging within the canopy. In addition to the guys getting a superb line-up I also scanned and modelled the front PA stacks and we integrated those into the project to get even cleaner coverage on these main areas that would be most seen by the audience and camera.

As mentioned earlier this years show was much much bigger with many more “moving parts”, more projection, more automation tracking, bigger surfaces meaning larger content file sizes. I decided to put Jack in the hot seat to program the show this year with programming support from myself. This freed me up to look after the rest of the peripheral parts of the setup such as scanning, getting auto data sorted, programming alongside Jack when it was busy Jack generally looking after the team.

Its always a joy working with Pete Tilling who was on the team making sure everything was running smoothly with our LED vendors and making sure every department connected to screens was in the loop. Pete “might” have been the source of miniature ducks-of-moral that kept appearing on peoples desks around site

For the show we were receiving tracking data from Wi Creations and Stage one. Stage one were looking after the diamond performance wall in the images below and Wi were looking after “The Louvres”. The louvres were huge 2m x 10m slabs of led which could track on and off stage as well as rotate, when they were in their default position they formed and huge 24x 10m led screen. Hats off to Wi as it was s feat of engineering and perseverance to get the joins between the panels practically seamless.

We were doing some neat stuff on this gig with d3 &projection, not only on the canopy but also on the diamond wall which was a moving piece of set. With the tracking data from stage one we made the projection stick to the moving set and in addition we were also using the tracking data from the louvres to mask projection so it didn’t project on the louvres.

2025 has so far been the biggest so far for the Joy awards an with once again a great team puling off another flawless show from screens even including a few curveballs throw at us with last minute changes in the middle of the show. Here’s a selection of photos of outtakes of the wonderful screens team that made it all possible

Posted in Catalyst, cinema4d, d3, Work | Tagged joy awards, LED, Projection Mapping, rhino3d, riyadh, saudi | Leave a comment

Warhorse – The Rip

Posted on December 13, 2024 by andy

Late august my good friend Jack Nicklin-Jewell got in touch, he was in rehearsals programming the upcoming tour of warhorse and had some issues with the 3D model of the projection screen didn’t match the physically built screen. d3 was being used as the media server of choice for the tour and it was important that the mesh used in d3 was matching as close as possible to the physical set

Jack had been supplied with a cad of the drawings that the set had been constructed of but additional set dressing had been added to the original plywood base to make it look like a giant piece of paper torn from a page, thus why it is called The Rip. The install of the show in various locations around the UK was going to be very tight and handled by LX, to help with a faster slick lineup Fibre optic LED were placed embedded into the surface of the screen. This meant that for lineup it was a simple task of dragging the “quickcal” points from the 3d mesh onto the physical set and the software would workout the rest.

When I first got the call, the production had requested a scan with my Faro Focus but on further discussion and finding out what the actual job was I decided that reconstructing the set using photogrammetry. The main reason being was to make sure the fibre optic lineup dots were captured, this is a detail that could be missed by the the scanner and also I have more control of the actual image texture captured in terms of light levels and quality of image VS the image capture on the scanner.

I was already traveling down to london to do my yearly CVC banking conference with Graymatter and Giggle Studio so I also packed my Sony A7V to go and do the image capture of “The Rip” at Wimbledon before my main job. Over the last few years I’ve been using photogrammetry quite a bit for constructing models but only in the last 12 months has it became part of my official workflow supplementing or replacing a traditional scan depending on the project and the environmental factors.

I arrived in London early and checked into my hotel, I wasn’t on the Graymatter job until the following day so this fitted in nicely. I packed my camera kit and headed over to the New Wimbledon Theatre where they were rehearsing warhorse. I met Jack & Alex there and we went in to find an opportune time to capture the images, I needed a clear stage but as soon as the actors had finished onstage everyone else wanted access to the stage to do other stuff, classic theatre. We eventually found a time where i had 20 mins to get the images, I had already prepared ahead of time some 4k static noise to project onto the surface, this was done to generate some features on the surface of the plain set piece to help the software reconstruct a mesh. Without any features, or very few its very difficult for the photogrammetry software to generate a model form the images, projecting a basic static pattern on a plain surface to help the software was a little trick I developed when doing some R&D into this problem earlier in the year and it works a treat.

Above are a few of the R&D images using projected noise to create a reference base.

Eventually after rehearsals were done i had time onstage to capture the images, it was quite a dark stage even with the lighting and projected noise hitting the projected surface so had to use a higher iso and shutter sped thank id have liked to but i was on a tripod so the shutter speed wasn’t too much of a problem. I took several test shots, checked them on the camera, adjusting my camera values until I was happy with the settings. I think I took around 80 images in a linear parade at various distances and angles to the surface. In addition to the set piece I also made sure I captured the proscenium arch which i had physically measured the distance and then I used this distance to scale the whole scene when reconstructed so the virtual matched the physical.

I brought all of the images into Reality Capture after a little bit of tweaking in DXO photolab and RC did an excellent job of aligning the cameras straight away. I did a reconstruction box to get rid of the rest of the theater that didn’t need constructing but kept in the proscenium left and right which i was using to uniform scale the scene. The trick with projecting noise on the surface worked a treat and it gave me a nice clean construction of the surface.

Once I scaled the scene, I filtered out all of the polys that weren’t part of the set piece, generated a 8k texture and then exported it as an FBX ready to go into Cinema4d to do the retopology and UV.

There was an existing model built from the cad that didn’t match the set butt here was also the associated UV with the model that I needed to closely match with the new retopo I was doing from the capture data. For testing purposes to send to to jack to make sure the workflow fully worked I did a bit more clean up of the mesh in C4d and did a quick mesh using Quadremesher a great tool for a quick quad based mesh. I then did some further clean-up on the re-mesh, matched the UV and sent it over to Jack for testing.

I then went back to the model and started doing a much cleaner retopo, quadremesher is good but in many cases doesn’t give a clean edge on an object of this shape. For my manual retopo I started with a cylinder shape and scaled it up so the radius of the cylinder sat exactly un the “cup” of the screen mesh. I then messed around with the horizontal and vertical sub-divisions to get a good density of quads, once I was happy I made the object editable, roughly deleted all the quads I didn’t need around the edges. Once I had the overall shape, I used the photogrammetry mesh as a guide and using the knife tool I cut around my really clean quad mesh until it was exactly the same shape as the capture mesh. Its totally worth doing these things manually so you have full control of the process, also having a clean mesh like this made the UVing so much easier and cleaner to closely match the existing UV

The next step was to locate the fibre optics from the photogrammetry texture and transfer them to a UV layer so this could be overlayed on the mesh for line-up quck-cal the projection during line up. For this is basically overlayed the source mesh with texture on top of the new mesh and then using the 3d painting mode in the UV window in c4d I painted directly in the new mesh and this dot transferred to a UV layer. Below is a basic example, using where I painted a face on the cube in 3d space and it transfers tot he UV, its super useful for things like this.

In addition, I made another mesh which matched the fibre optic markers as a helper mesh which could be loaded into d3 in addition to the clean mesh as that’s how Jack had it setup and I like consistency

That’s it for this blog post, this was fun project spanning multiple skillsets and also working with good people.

FIN

Posted in cinema4d, d3, Photogrammetry, Projection Mapping | Leave a comment

EWC with Bright Studios

Posted on October 18, 2024 by andy

June through to July this year (2024) I was out in Riyadh, Saudi with Bright doing the E-sports world cup, previously known as Gamers8. This was the third year doing this with Bright and the gig has grown considerably since year one which feels like so long ago now.

The event revolves around some of the best esports teams in the world who have been through various stages to get to compete in the world cup in Riyadh. A multitude of games are played over a course of several weeks culminating in a grand final based between 2 teams with the most cumulative points.

Year one we had one main games arena for the playing of the games and one studio for commentary during and between the games, all if this being streamed to various online platforms mainly twitch and youtube.

Both the studio and the arena had multiple AR elements to the show to have game characters appear onstage in camera next to the players and also a very grand opening sequence which started the games each day.

With two and a bit weeks setup before the the first event there was a lot to do, Stageprecision was used throughout, a team spent about a week calibrating the camera lens for all postion’s creating a lens profile to match the exact camera body it was attached too. This was then used to take into account the lens distortion when overlaying the AR which came directly form Unreal via the Stage precision Shield plugin.

In addition to controlling all of the Unreal nodes for the AR, stage precision was taking in all of the game logic API and based on events in the game it was then sending triggers audio lighting and disguise. This meant when there was a “spawn” or a “kill” event in the game LX Video and Audio would be triggered at the right time for the correct look or sound stem.

Krystoph and Tabea measuring for the camera nodal point

And another thing SP was handling was the tracking data coming from the cameras, reformatting and offsetting the data to get the physical and the virtual worlds aligned so the AR looked correct. All of the cameras had a Stype Red spy system on, apart from the spider cam which had its own system. We had quite a few issues with the spider cam data drifting and needing resetting quite often which was a bit trial and error to start with but once everyone got in the swing of “how to make it look right” we were golden. The Spider cam tracking looks like it works great when you see it on a stadium size gig but for our purposes it didn’t really cut it for the accuracy we needed in this smaller size venue (more on this later).

This was the control position for year 1 in the same arena as the games were being played, we were behind the seating bank and as with most gigs in Saudi it was a building site for the first couple of weeks. Everything was continuously covered in dust and the temperature swung between hot and cold as the people who were in charge of the building tried to get the correct air-con setting.

I was operating d3 on the gig which was delivering all the content to the led and rendering scores to the led via a notch block running over renderstream from RX servers. The notch block got the games score data from the API via SP and we also got indirections from the games engine API via SP which pulled up the correct player/team name before going to a particular cue. All of this was triggered by a button push on a streamdeck that sent a command to SP which then pulled infor from the games API and sent the relevant triggers to multiple departments.The whole system integration was complex and had a lot of moving parts, the above is just a few. And to those who are reading this who got lost in the terminology heres a breakdown.

d3 : disguise media server
Indirection : The terminology when send sending a file path string to d3 to display content in a video layer/module
Notch : realtime rendering engine that can be played and procedurally updated within d3
Renderstream : disguise’s proprietary system for sending a video stream over a network
RX : Rendering machine part of the disguise ecosystem
SP : Stage Precision live event and production toolkit
API : Application Programming Interface, a way to pick up data from a computer program over a network.

Everything worked smoothly except renderstream which would crash and bring down the servers after running for around 5 to 6 hours and most of our broadcast was around 8 hours each day. The disguise devs were great and we spent a long time with them trying to identify the issue but it was never resolved. In the end we moved the notch block to run on one of the local Gx machines which worked a treat.

Heres one of Krzystophs brilliant memes which helped keep us going

That was a brief recap on year 1 of Gamers8 now we fast forward to 2024 where the event has grown considerably from 1 arena and 1 studio, in 2024 we had 3 x arenas, 3 x English studio’s and 3 x Arabic studios. Usually I’m out for the setup for this but this year Matt & Pillerin were holding their wedding party which Kristaps & myself were attending. This meant Kristaps, Matt & myself didn’t go out until 10 days into the setup which as were all kind pleased about. The celebration was really nice, we all met in Tallin, Estonia and enjoyed a great party and generally just hanging out

After flying home from the party, repacking and sorting out the flat I was on a flight the following day to Riyadh, with a quick stop in LHR where I met Adam for the next flight and we arrived in Riyadh late that evening. The following day we all met the team who had been here for the last 10 days and heard all the horror stories of the site not being finished which still didn’t really prepare us for when we got onsite and seen ourselves how still unfinished it was.

The building was sill being built when we got there, windows were missing, the toilets were still being constructed and the air-con didn’t work. It was at this point i actually realised the extent of the shitty environment the guys had to endure for the first couple of weeks before we got there and they had done a great job managing to get everything in.

View to the left of my control station with Ufuk working on one of the studios.

In 2023 all the operating positions for each stage were in the same arena that the stage was in, either operating from behind the set or behind the bleachers. This year we had a unified control room with the servers at the stage and all remote KVM to the operating positions. Being in one space had its pros and cons, it was nice that it was quite social being able to see each other and bounce ideas between us. The down side was that the space was just too cramped and got quite noisy, nice idea, just needed more space.

View to my right featuring Nate and Kris

For the first week we were onsite for one day, off for three because the content wasn’t read then back in for the remaining 3 days for some frantic programming and collectively figuring out how the show should opperate and fit together with all the other departments. I think it was on the 4th f July we were meant to have our first full rehersal with all departments but that turned into a slow stumble through. Everything was delayed generally hampered by the building flaws the general struggle to get things done in the Saudi environment

Rehearsal’s, once we got into the swing of them were supper slow, there had been constant changes between different departments and quite often early on these changes weren’t relayed to everyone. This mean that when I hit that button on the stream desk it didn’t always turn out as expected. Sometimes the wrong states/character’s were being displayed and I spent quite a bit of time on coms with he various departments figuring out if we were sending he wrong command or they had programmed the wrong “pickup” at their end.

Eventually we were all lined up across departments and things were working as expected, the AR looked great so crisp and the tracking was really tight. I was there for only 2 weeks of games which was enough. All of the interesting and challenging stuff happens in the install and set and after that I just became a button pushing monkey with a bit of managing communication between departments.

Cube Stage control, my work view for 3 weeks.

It was a good few weeks working with friends, making new friends and hanging out in an dusty parking lot between construction equipment waiting for Ubers.

Posted in d3 | Tagged ar, bright, camera tracking, d3, LED, saudi, stage precision, stype, work | Leave a comment

The Eurovision Post

Posted on August 1, 2024 by andy

It must have been around February 2023 when I got a call from Chris asking if I was up for being part of the video programming team for the Eurovision Song Contest 2023 in Liverpool. I of course said yes, not only because it was an exciting gig to be involved with but more-so I knew who else was on the team and it was a bunch of folk I love working with.

This year the UK was hosting Eurovision on behalf of the UK and the venue was Liverpool arena. For the event the spaces in the arena that were usually used as offices for the day to day running of the complex were cleared and kindly handed over to Eurovision for the duration of the gig.

Harry(Hazza)R, DanH, AlexP, DanL and MikeS from QED were onsite with us doing a sterling job of getting the system in and keeping it up running. We had a boatload of disguise servers for the massive led screens, several projection elements for the show and also Luke, Jack, Sam & myself had a dedicated server each as an editor for system consistency. Ed was also on the team and in charge of media wrangling for all the content that was coming in from various providers.

Dan & Harry had set up a nice system for each of our programming stations where we had a stream deck triggering presets in a rack-mount audio mixer which was routing the different timecode sources and audio to and from the editor machines. This meant we could each be independently programming parts of the show using the shared audio tracks striped with the relevant timecode played back from our local machines. It was a really nice clean solution and helped speed up the workflow being able to instantly switch and listen to TC and audio sources so quickly.

Also part of the team we had Emily, Brigsy and Max from d3 who were onsite with us for support and implementing the spike mark system for the event. The spike mark system was a nice elegant solution where the stage management team who were onstage with ipads were able to notate positions on the led drawing various symbols. These could be saved as snapshots/presets pushed on the server sending signal to the floor. Emily and Brigsy had developed the main core months previous to us loading in and were constantly adding and improving to the system onsite. The first time we had a try of the system onsite it was really intuitive and we (I) came up with this.

I wasn’t the only one drawing speed dobbers onstage, here are team d3 looking proud, apart from max who isn’t as childish as the rest of us.

The d3 programming part of the show was pretty smooth and we had enough people to handle the work during rush times so there was no real stress moments. When content came in we divided the work to program individual tracks, sync the timecode tags and check for errors. Most act content came in as single tracks but there were a few that needed sequencing and some with camera perspective tricks that needed care and attention working with the director and cameras to get it looking correct. Luke was lead programmer pulling in the individual programmed tracks between us, assembling the final show timeline and sitting in the hot seat for the show.

In addition to the content on screen for the competition performances we also had content fir the presenter looks, the flag parade and the interstitial performances which happened between some of the songs. For this we had a team from the lovely people at Northouse who are always great to work with. There was quite a bit of sequencing i needed to do for this as there were many requests for changes in the content from above so we were receiving small sections at a time and adjusting timings as and when the audio tracks changed.

Try and find a picture of us all with northouse to go here.

I always try to create a nice working environment when on jobs and im a big fan of having ambient lighting around the office, so during the first few days i distributed fairy lights around the team to decorate the desks and also bought a few lava lamps for the mood too. Chris joined in on the fun too with his northern lights ceiling projector and a scent machine to make the office smell like a cheap spa.

We had 2 projection gags during the show, one for Ukraine and one for Armenia. The ukrane set was wheeled onto stage and the alignment had to be spot on to avoid any spill and also it was tightly mapped to the choreography. After a few teething problems hetting the set on and off and set in exactly the right position the stage mangent team were really good at hitting the mark with the set.

Even though the stage team got the location of the set spot on there was always room for tweaking and during to the show Jack was tweaking the lineup via a camera shot in the short turnaround before the number.

The other projection gag for Armenia was a trapezoidal’ish shaped ramp that the artist was standing on, in the projection. For this the set was made up of 2 pieces and the crew wheeled it onstage, stayed under it during the performance and wheeled it back off, it was brilliant to watch.

Heres an image of harry on the ramp being a stand in whilst the projection was beign focused and tested.

We had a 50k firing at from around 80m away at the set piece and it was so bright with no problem of being washed out by lighting.

In addition to the projection gags we also had a couple of forced perspective gags for an interstitial performance by Ukraine and content from Freckled Sky, the other was for the UK entry. The Ukraine pwerformance calles welcome to our house was a beautiful piece with two dancers performing against led backdrop depicting what was going on in the Ukraine at that time. There were several tricks in the content and choreography where through the camera when the performers walked behind a slab of led it looked like they continued into a virtual world as the content carries on their movement and silhouette.

The content was rendered out from a “hero shot” perspective where we had to map onto the virtual set in d3 and then this was displayed on the physical set. We then also had to work with the director and camera department to match as closely as possible the physical camera to our virtual camera, position and focal length.

Below is an embedded video of the performance which helps visually show whats going on much better than I can describe.

Id never really watch Eurovision for many years, I do remember watching it as a kid but this was the first time in ages that I was actually mentally invested in the competition. Between all of us there were 2 clear favourites that we were routing for and those were Croatia & Finland. Outside the venue Croatia had a mobile sauna and one of those good photo opportunity which we didnt think twice about sticking our heads through the holes for the camera.

After the show was over all of the acts were walking past our control room and everyone was cheering them on. Alum, one of the team from CT was a fellow Croatian of the band Let 3 and he fagged them down in the corridor and got a picture with them.

Overall the event was really well put together and such a wealth of talent working on a show together, it was one of those gigs that you kept bumping into people that you’ve not seen in a long time. This post could be much longer going into the technical intricacies for the show, how the whole team where referencing CuePilot for the programming of the show which is a fantastic system, to how we were picking up the automation and recording it into d3 so we had the ability to program offline with the correct screen moves. Its been nice to write this but have left out a lot, if theres anything yous like to know about the screens side please drop me an email.
Of course not forgetting the whole gig was peppered with googly eyes being stuck all over the venue and Liverpool.

Posted in d3, LED, music, Projection Mapping, Work | Tagged d3, eurovision, liverpool | Leave a comment

Touchdesigner Animation Subroutine

Posted on July 13, 2024 by andy

Hello!!! Week three here in Saudi working for Bright on the Esports World Cup and we’re settled into a routine with some time to be doing R&D for future projects. This week I’ve been doing a bit more discovering with Touchdesigner trying to figure out how to trigger an animation event. After few hours searching experimenting I found the animation operator which is fantastic tool allowing you to keyframe values which can be fed into assets to keyframe movement. Bellow is my simple patch which can be packaged up into a container and duplicated and used multiple times with different keyframes animations within a single project .

The heart of it is the animation COMP which doesn’t look like much until you click the edit button in the properties window and low and behold a window appears that allows you to add keyframes / edit them and overlay them on-top of each other for useful visual programming.

Adding channels is simple and can be tailored for each project, key framing is a little bit clunky to start with but there is a useful help window if you right click in the keyframe editor. After 10 and of figuring how to use the tool, key framing becomes quite intuitive and you can fine tune each key with a time and value above the timeline. Below is a simple animation I made key framing the rotation plus the x/y scale over 250 frames.

By default the animation op is locked to the project timeline and I wanted to be able to trigger and retriever the animation on cue. My solution to this was to use the counter op and set it to Increase Count in the While Off field. This will continually count up on each tick unless you set the limit to Clamp Min/Max. I set the Max to the length of my animation and I then used a keyboard input to trigger the reset, In addition I added a reset pinpoint value to be able to trigger further into the timeline easily. Below outlines the basic process and its a nice easy network to setup.

Historically I’ve used vvvv to program systems but since last year Ive been transitioning my knowledge over to Touchdesigner re-learning how to do things which I knew like the back of my hand in vvvv. Its important to keep learning new stuff, even of you don’t ever use it in the future its nice to play. That the end of this little post and to finish it off here’s a tenuous face int my banana at work.

Posted in Touchdesigner, Uncategorized | Tagged animation, keyframe, learning, saudi, touchdesigner, vvvv | Leave a comment