Hi:
I’m trying to figure out the best way to compose and render 3D cube walls so they look like they’re extruding into a large volume for a stage presentation.
I’ve attached a mockup which shows what it could look like from the perspective of an audience member.
The stage setup will have four walls with a projector sending an image to each wall. Left, back, right and top. The back wall will be taken up by Powerpoint-type stuff, but they want these abstract cubes on the side and top walls, rendered in such a way so that from the audience perspective you see the extrusion of the cubes. If I put the camera in the middle of that virtual space the cubes would be rendered and projected head on, so from the audience perspective you’d just see squares. I’m trying to figure out how to best force the perspective to get that apparent depth coming into the stage volume.
My first rough approach was to just render it in perspective then crop and corner pin a side into a 1080x1080 square (the pixel dimensions of the side panels) in After Effects. It looks like that could work, but it seems like there could be a more streamlined approach you could do in C4D to avoid having to stretch and pin it, resulting in a loss of quality. These wall elements will animate, like the cubes would extrude out of the “flat” walls in some way. I don’t know if some sort of camera mapping in C4D would be a more efficient approach. It seems like you’d have to do it in two passes, one to render the walls in perspective and another to camera map them to a square shape. There probably isn’t any way to feed the view from a “live” camera to a texture and shoot that with a second camera for rendering, all in one pass.
I realize that the perspectives won’t line up properly for everyone in the audience, but I think they’d prefer this effect to simply rendering the cubes head on for each side, losing that depth.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks.
Shawn Marshall
Marshall Arts Motion Graphics