irwan clark

At the end of August 2024, through the University of Canterbury (UC), I had the opportunity to create a short animation to be projected onto a building for the 2024 Illuminate Light Show in Christchurch.

This project was led by Oana Jones from UC. It involved getting the UV map of the building, the Arts Centre building in Christchurch, and creating an animation on the UV map to be projected onto the building.

Using this facade made by Oana, I started building my scene. After some testing other ideas, I decided on making a marble run. To make use of the architecture I would have the marbles travel around the pillars, and follow the architecture.

After making the run I started creating the materials. To make it standout against the building I tested different sets of materials. I started by using chrome/metallic materials for the rails and marbles. After seeing a test of the animation displayed on the building I discovered that the materials were too dull. From this, I decided to switch to neon materials. I used emission along with vibrant colours to stand out against the building.

Once I finalised the materials I rendered out the animation. I then needed to project the animation onto the UV map to get an accurate projection. I did this by using a set of plugins with Blender (Project Image From Camera | Sequence Bakery). After modifying the ‘ProjectionNode’ add-on to use image sequences I used it to project the rendered images onto the building object. This made the images from the initial render conform to the buildings UV map. However, I couldn’t just render this as I would encounter the same issue as before. I used the ‘Sequence Bakery’ add-on to fix this. This add-on enables animated material baking in Blender. I needed to use this to get the projected images as a material from the building as an animation. After using these add-ons I now had the final animation that I submitted for the light display.

Raw animation:

Animation Projected Onto Building:

From this project I learned a lot about working with projection mapping and getting digital renders onto physical buildings.