This is what happens when you take each face of that cube, map a solid color onto each face of each cube, then export one frame of that (at the native resolution of your projector) into an app like VEGAS Effects (there's some 3D CG stuff in here too), making animations using the image as a guide so you know where each face of each cube is from the projector's point of view, meaning it will all line up right when you project it back onto the real thing (if it it's a little off, Mesh Warp can fix that too!).

This is what happens when you take the same image from the above step, and send it into a 3D animation app like blender or cinema 4D, render a cube to the same dimensions of the real cube(s) in the app, tell it how far away, how high, and what angle the projector is by putting a virtual camera in that exact spot and matching those parameters... check your alignment against the reference image you generated in VEGAS, render those cubes doing stuff in the software, send those frames back into VEGAS, and fix any alignment errors (within reason) in VEGAS using Mesh Warp again.

Wow, inspiring!

Here's some of my work:

https://www.facebook.com/Imagicvideo/videos/2139688852913647/

And our holographic water screens:

I think I retired from theater production about ten years too early. Congratulations on some mindblowing effects and artistry!

The Tool album release party - this wasn't an official Tool event, was it?

The Tool album release party - this wasn't an official Tool event, was it?

No, just something me and a buddy of mine who has some lasers did for fun, we weren't even technically open to the public, it was more of a private event.

I think I retired from theater production about ten years too early. Congratulations on some mindblowing effects and artistry!

Thank you! Of all of these (besides the water screen stuff), the dance performance took the longest. There was a lot of choreography that had to go into it, making sure the kids stayed in sync with the visuals, and making sure the models we built in CG were the proper scale to align with the real thing when projected, which still required some mesh warping to get it right.

Saw A Perfect Circle last year but no chance to get tickets for a Tool event.

Anyway, this projections are an amazing piece of creativity. Totally different to what I usually do.

Tool is an amazing experience. I've been good friends with their lighting designer, Junior, for about 10 years now. He's taught me a lot about how to do a good production, and they keep stepping their game up every time they hit the road. In addition to the lights, lasers, transparent projections, and massive LED screens, their 3D audio is also amazing, and some of the most crystal clear live audio I've ever heard in an arena.

Not to mention the band, they put on a phenomenal experience every time they play.

Thanks for the compliments! Try the tutorial out with a projector, it can be quite addictive! If you get into it, check out Resolume Arena, it's software made for doing this sort of thing on the fly, in real-time. VEGAS' mesh warp capability lets us see how our animations will look properly warped onto a surface without having to leave the app, so it saves a bunch of time, and also lets us "bake in" or "mix down" our mesh warps into the video itself, which frees up CPU from having to do it in real time in Resolume (not that it is much of a CPU intensive process, but any extra power is a good thing!).

... and we waited soooooo long for Fear Inoculum.

It seems it is time to afford a projector soon.

Absolutely BRILLIANT!

This would be the last thing on my mind that VP could do!

Would VP be able to do a mesh warp transform for a live input?

VEGAS doesn't have a mechanism for that, but Resolume Arena does. VEGAS is useful mainly for content creation (especially with Post) and baking mesh warps into one video to reduce CPU strain. Its ability to encode directly to formats like DXV, which arena pretty much requires to work right, is a big plus, since Adobe discontinued support for the format.

Here's one of my first mapping experiments... overlaying a photo of the wall onto the real thing, then animating it. All done within vegas.