How You Design Lighting, When You Have No Lights, and No Sculpture...
Hey folks. We hit another milestone moving towards our upcoming installation at SXSW this March in Austin, TX!The Problem: We're still seeking sponsorship to fund the purchase of the required materials to build the sculpture -- especially the most expensive part, the lights. As a result, we still don't have hardware to display our evolving lighting designs for game-playing, interactive art and background modes. The trouble is, we have to move ahead in developing all of these animations, so that we're ready to build when the hardware arrives.
Our Solution: To work around this dilemma, we've developed a couple of techniques for previsualizing the sculpture, with lights in motion. Michael has worked up a working WebGL-based visualizer (shown at this link. NOTE: Your browser must have WebGL support turned on to view this.), and I (Dave) have whipped up a similar OpenGL 'virtual sculpture,' in a standalone app. The latter, shown-below, listens in real-time (over a socket) to what the lighting engine is generating, and displays it in an interactive window. Although it isn't shown in the video, you can rotate and scale the sculpture to show various viewing angles, all while the lights are being animated. Problem solved!
Using our virtual sculpture to design with, I've been able to create a few initial screen-saver presets for the piece, shown here... Enjoy!