Party House

Party House is a projection mapped dollhouse that was quickly thrown together for the DorkbotPDX Open Mic Surgery event. It was written in a few days using the Cinder library. The source code is available here: PARTY HOUSE REPO.

It was super fun to perform. It wasn’t a complex or hard thing to do, but sitting up on stage pumping my fist and hitting space bar over and over again to the beat was fun. I’d definitely like to do more of this kind of “work”.

I had originally followed this Madmapper tutorial on mapping a building with madmapper and creating a video to go along with it in After Effects. It was a great introduction. I ended up running into problems in my case because the doll house had lots of overhangs and different planes to work with. Maybe if you’re projecting on a huge building, the building dwarfs the projector by enough that you can treat it as one plane. But in this case, I had to create a bunch of planes to make everything line up nicely.

This is also the first time I’ve used After Effects at all. It was nice to just make some videos and them layer them on the fly during my set. I definitely want to spend more time learning After Effects for future projects.

I ended up writing my own software to do the mapping because I’m a hacker and just wanted to. The code isn’t that great, but I do think the EditorViewport and ControlPoint classes are nice enough to re-use in future projects. I also updated the code to use the newest branch of Cinder, so it now supports multiple windows. It was also fun to start using C++11 features.