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Animating for a Cone! LED surface.
Okay this is a tough one.
I am part of team of people here in Brazil creating content for a christmas tree made from LED clusters, arranged in a cone-like shape. Things are even more complicated because this “Tree” has 8 stories and there are resolution variations between them… but let’s not get into that.
My main problem here is that since our “screen” is a 3d cone and we are animating on a 2d file in After Effects I need someway to set up a file where everything that leaves the screen in one side of the file reappears on the opposite side… much like a seamless background.
This might not actually be possible… but I thought tat maybe someone here would have ideas… maybe something with the offset filter, or displacement map and expressions… Anyway if we can’t find a simple way to do this we will just avoid the problem.
Thanks for any suggestions!! -
13 Replies
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Can’t tell from your post if this a real 30 meter tree or a tree in a scene in an animation.
It is relatively easy to create a long and narrow composition that has several discrete screens on it. Each screen can be a precomp.
Your problem is playing this thing back. You can record each of the screens separately and play the separate tapes/DVDs in tight sync or you can use a giant playout system that can talk to multiple displays.So, it’s easy to do, just takes some planning. You must know exactly how you are going to deliver the movies before you startplanning your After Effects use.
(Trish and Chris Meyer used to have a tutorial on their site explaining how they animated a huge ceiling display in Las Vegas, don’t see that it is available anymore, though)
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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It is a real tree, well a fake tree but real, not an animation. It is made from LED clusters that form a cone. So it is like making an animation that will later be wrapped around a bottle, if you get what I mean. With the aditional problem of the screen getting thinner as it gets higher… Multible screens is not the answer. I’m thinking something that would allow you to animate in polar coordinate mode and then unwrap this animation… (we are not talking about squares moving from point a to point be either… I mean particles and such. I figured out a way to do it with polar coordinates and fractal noise, but that only solves some background use. As for an object that climbs this cone in a spiral motion, that is still up for grabs.
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I think you need something such as Conoa 3D or a 3D app — something that maps to a 3D cone better than AE.
Yep, taking an object along a diagonal path, then applying polar coordinates should get you a spiral. In a 3D app, to get a seamless spiral mapped onto the cone, you could map the spiral from the top using flat projection, rotated P=-90. In Cinema 4D, anyway.
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what is being used for playout to all the screens/clusters that are on the tree?
if the playout image is a flat rectangle, how is that image being mapped to the clusters? like, which cluster is displaying the upper right corner of the playout image, or if there is a single top cluster, which section of the playout image is being displayed on that cluster…?
it seems like your polar coordinates technique should work, but i think you need to know how that final image will be mapped to the tree…
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Of course, that makes perfect sense.
It may be possible to test the image-to-LED mapping projection process by mapping test images to a cone in a 3D app. Flat projection? Which axis? That will determine what the movie looks like: a circle? A wedge?
So I echo Kevin’s question: how are you mapping the image to the LEDs?
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I echo my original postulate:
> So, it’s easy to do, just takes some planning. You must know exactly how you are going to deliver the movies before you start planning your After Effects use. < What the heck are "LED clusters" arranged in a cone that make a real tree, well sort of. What controls the LED display? Are these miniature RGBW units? Strands fo xmas lights? Tens of thousands of 2" screens from old digital cameras? bogiesan
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Okay, I’m noticing some anxiety from you Bogiesan.
“It’s easy to do” – I don’t think so.
“It takes Planing” – of course.What are LED Clusters: https://www.lc-led.com/View/itemNumber/245
These clusters can be arranged whatever way you see fit (cone,sphere, spread out on the floor… whatever). There is a hardware system and a specific software in place that takes a conventional rectangular animation and maps out those pixels onto these LED clusters, leaving out pixels that are not used. I don’t know much more about it, except that if you are doing a conventional rectangular surface everything is easy. But if you want an image to climb this cone in a spiral motion then things get very complicated.
The Idea to map the animation onto a 3d cone to visualize is great, I will try to set that up, it will help to see what kind of distortion we are dealing with.
My wish was that there existed a way to animate in polar coordinates, and then when the animations is finished you could convert back to regular coordinates. The photoshop and After effects filters do not allow you to do this, only to visualize something in both ways.
again, the issue is not how the image will get onto our display, but how to create the content so that it is seamless.
Anybody know if this exists?
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This is our current diagram for our animation:
https://www.robertobellini.com/tree_diagram.jpgWhat you see is the 8 levels of our tree, the three base levels being the same resolution are united. Every level above that has less pixels then the one below it, that is way you get that “pyramid” like shape. The software used later maps out the this shape to our tree, leaving the black pixels out.
Sounds strange, but it works. The only issue is the seamless border.
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So it’s sort of like cylinder-mapping a discrete number of cylinders? Like a wedding cake?
If so, I can see a definite “stepping” effect when an animated object moves up to the next cyclinder … so I see an issue not just with seamless mapping around the cone, but being seamless within the cone.
Since the tree will be a cone, ideally you’d need a cylinder that’s the height of one string of LEDs, if we imagine a tree made up of all LEDs. But that’s not the case, apparently.
If I were you, I’d have no animations crossing the boundaries between the levels. Then you’d just have to worry about the distortion involved within each level.
Actually, I’m concerned that whoever designed this system hasn’t seen how it maps to a cone. In my opinion, the diagram should not look like a ziggurat, but like a series of warped, concave-upward surface developments. Sort of like this (https://www.hsecc.co.za/posters/inter2.pdf ) but sideways, u-shaped. Imagine each level, with the ends warped upward. But then that probably could not be mapped cylindrically.
Anyway, I definitely think you’ll need to “rehearse” the mapping with a 3D cone.
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You are absolutely right Steve,
The weeding cake analogy is correct, except in reality the distance between the LED’s will make them look like cone sections.
The diagram represents the amount of pixels we have at our disposal in each section.
There is the issue of the “steps” between the levels on vertical movement between the cylinders. Though in this case since this is supposed to be a Christmas tree we decided to run with this… The objective is not “Flat” cone but to have these steps on the tree much like this classic tree shape (ugly example): https://www.vikingtacoma.com/ChristmasTree.jpg
We are planing to use this in our favor and animate the different sections etc…I’m probably not making much sense, but after the 12th I’ll post some pictures of the real thing… since that’s when we light this baby up.
Thanks for the help!
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