Transfer mode to simulate projection

[Darby Edelen]

‘Screen’ would be your best option for this.

Darby Edelen

[Michael Szalapski]

Seriously? There aren’t that many different blending modes that it would take you that long to try it out. It took longer to type your response and wait for an answer than it would take to go through all of them.

Nothing wrong with asking how to make something look projected, it just sounds funny to ask a question that you could answer yourself it, like, two minutes.

Don’t forget, when compositing something, you want to make it match. If the wall’s not razor sharp in your source footage, make sure to blur the projection slightly. Adding a bit of flickering with some sort of wiggle on the opacity wouldn’t hurt. It really depends on the type of projector you want to emulate.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Dusty Brindle]

I think you are not quite getting what I am trying to do. What I need to do is simulate what a projection would look like on a wall that is covered in posters, not for an AE rendering but so that we can have an idea what it would look like in the real world. Was wondering if there were plug-ins with an expanded set of transfer modes that may give a more accurate idea since the standard AE modes all have their issues when trying to simulate this, trying to find the most accurate way to see this.

[Michael Szalapski]

Ohhhhhhhh! I understand.

Projection is just adding light to a scene; it’s not going to darken it. So add or, more likely screen; as previously mentioned will do it.

However, there are too many different variables in different situations to know how to properly simulate it. Levels of light reflection of various surfaces, level of ambient light in a room, and the power of your projector are all going to be a factor.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Brian Charles]

Another method to simulate projection is to set up the projected layer and the surface to receive the projection in 3D space.

Set up a light directed at the layer to be projected and set its light transmission to 100% (or whatever you want). The light will project the image onto the surface. You may need to play with some of the cast shadow settings etc. But it will give you a better simulation than transfer/blending modes.

[Brian Charles]

100_projection.gif.zip

[Brian Charles]

[Darby Edelen]

[Brian Charles] “But it will give you a better simulation than transfer/blending modes.”

This is not true.

The shadow of the image with light transmission at 100% effectively uses the ‘multiply’ blend mode, which doesn’t simulate light being projected in the real world.

The wall will be darkened by this method.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

To expand on this thought. You can produce a light projection effect using a similar technique only inverting the projection layer as well as what it’s being projected onto, then using an adjustment layer (or pre-comp) to invert them both back.

Note that this is exactly the same as the ‘screen’ method, which inverts A and B, multiplies them together and then inverts the result:

Screen(A,B) = 1 – ((1 – A) * (1 – B));

Assuming white has a value of 1.0 and black has a value of 0.0 on the layers A & B.

Darby Edelen

[Mariano Moscuzza]

I was asking me the same question… I was testing and figured out that the more accurate blending mode (for me) was lighter color…

“Each result pixel is the color of lighter of the source color value and the corresponding underlying color value. Lighter Color is similar to Lighten, but Lighter Color does not operate on individual color channels.”