[Roberto Bellini]

For those wondering what the hell this was all about here is what it looked like in the end, thanks for all the feedback.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KJ6c3-wEzK0&feature=related

https://www.flickr.com/photos/9996828@N05/2106176145

https://www.flickr.com/photos/carlmarx/2138603771/

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[Roberto Bellini]

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!

[Roberto Bellini]

This is our current diagram for our animation:
https://www.robertobellini.com/tree_diagram.jpg

What 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.

[Roberto Bellini]

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?

[Roberto Bellini]

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.