The iconic SLS of South Beach decided to crank things up a bit for Miami Music Week 2017 with Projection Mapping for their exclusive Pool Party. Artistic Projection created a stunning, vibrant display on the ocean view side of the 12 story hotel.
Projection Mapping is a technique that allows us to us video in three dimensions. We are essentially painting surfaces with video projectors, state of the art computing, and cleverly designed imagery.
I try to come up with new ways to interact with the architectural features of a building like this. You can see some nice flat surfaces - but there are a ton of windows.
I knew that I wanted to mask the windows, so I just deleted those faces from the model. Then it was all about fitting content within the regions that were still available. By using a glass texture and extruding the windows backward I was able to come up with this look.
I primarily used Blender for 3D Modeling, UV operations, Animations and Simulations. Post Production was done in After Effects. Here are some examples.
Any size or shape, these techniques are scalable.
For this surface, I used two Barco HDX-W20 projectors to send a raster of 1920x2200 pixels to the SLS. A third projector on standby for backup.
These pixels need to be trained by a media server, for this project I decided to go with the Avolites Ai Miami license on my custom server. Ai is a CAD based media server platform that makes the process flexible and straightforward.
Working in a 3D space allows me to create the majority of the show ahead of time, with virtual previews that I can send to you ahead of the show.
