Bill Watts - Mock Ups - Assignment 4

Projection Mapping Mock Ups from Bill Watts on Vimeo.

In developing my themes for these nine mock ups, I found myself looking through the variety of rig calisthenics videos I have created over the years to demonstrate various rig capabilities. This led me to the idea of progression, and the glitchy issues that inevitably pop up over the course of intensely studying any subject.
In selecting my locations, I took a stroll around the UTD campus looking for corners. I found myself particularly drawn to locations with natural framing elements like flower beds and doors. Symmetry plays a strong role in much of my 3D work and influenced my choice of locations. 

Here I will be describing my thoughts behind each composition.
1) Experienced Opposed – The projection surrounding the elevators is a recording of me doing some shading, which I am not particularly skilled at. The floor shows the growth of a node network over the course of rigging some lips, which I feel far more comfortable doing. I perceive a certain neutrality in the piece as the levels of familiarity equalize the piece.
2) Digital Anthropology – Physical anthropology refers to the development of a human over the long term. This piece is somewhat representative of my own development. The elevator doors have calisthenics of old rigs, while the center is a more recent rig being progressively broken.
3) Summer Dreams – This piece uses footage created over the summer in the ReelFx summer studio course. The film ’Snatch’ shown on the center wall has been data moshed to break up the originally intended smoothness of the film in favor of corruption. The jerky, rough movements of this composition remind me of the production process of the summer shorts.
4) Mish-Smash – The initial thinking behind this piece was the idea of even though we walk in opposite directions, we end up in the same place. That place just happens to be rather chaotic. I found a loading bay at the Founders West Annex to have excellent corners. The marching figures are crowd simulation tests I did in Houdini.
5) Progression – The footage on the walls of the building is a comparison of a bird rig I did years ago and one made recently. The progression between the two becomes apparent almost immediately. The distortion of the eagle and floor was created with the Modul8 transformer functionality.
6) Alpha Defined – This experiment uses transparency to only project movement and color on the wall without the clutter of a background. It works, but could be more effective in a more interesting location. The theme of this piece is wander, but watch the fall.
7) Gypsum Break – I found Modul8 also to be effective for real-time photo manipulation. In this location, I played with a couple different masking layouts. The thinking behind this piece is downward flow in the flower beds. With some processing(middle bed), anything can be anything.
8) Compounding Factors is the result of a realization that even though I can’t use .gifs in Modul8, they work perfectly fine in MadMapper. These data moshed clips are the definition of progression as bits of previous frames stick around to change the resulting composition.
9) Achy-Breaky – A combination of noise and text from Maya form the cradle of windows into broken and distorted geometry. As in Compounding Factors, the flower beds form frames or windows.