Introduction/Looking for more information

vvvv beta question
1

Hi everyone I am here because I recently watched a live performance by Amon Tobin called ISAM and left mesmerized by what I saw. Have you all seen this? Wow. Anyways I have always been fascinated by graphics and visuals and of course music is a passion of mine and when I stumbled upon vvvv I realized maybe I can take my interest more seriously! Of course for now I am only looking to use vvvv as a hobby as my time is consumed by my normal business.

So I am very much looking forward to interacting with everyone here. For now I am sure I will be able to offer very little help but as I learn and experiment more I will (hopefully) be a valuable part of the community.

In the mean time I am wondering how I can learn more? I am in Houston, TX, USA and I am willing to travel to learn more and take courses on vvvv but I find they are all in Europe! Anyone here in the USA or Canada that has knowledge wants to tutor me? I can fly to your city and of course happily pay for your time (and more importantly, patience)!

I have spent the last two weeks maybe five hours at least every day pouring through the tutorials and although I have learned a lot I am finding that as I get deeper into the tutorials there are some basic concepts that I am having a hard time grasping.

Anyways, my ultimate goal is to create beautiful projection mapping experiences for my own music that I compose on guitar and violin (with some beats too hehe). I have discovered the audio features of vvvv and can’t wait to truly integrate them!

Today, after many many hours, I was able to project a “virtual cube” onto a real cube using the 3d projection mapping tutorial. This was amazing!!!

But now that I have accomplished this this has opened up many questions…

Mainly they involve textures. It is very easy for me to apply the same texture to each surface, but as I investigated the idea of using multiple textures on one cube I started getting very, very confused. Then, when I started exploring “stretching” one texture over the entire surface of a cube I got even more confused.

I did, however, learn to use the basics of “mesh” and “vertexbuffer” and was able to make a cube from just those nodes. But when it comes to applying textures I am completely lost.

Do you know of any tutorials I can start with? I have been to the DirectX Microsoft site and read all of it but it is also confusing. I wonder if there is any more basic way of learning textures and how they work?

Also what is the best way of handling my box for projection mapping. Should I be using the simple “box” node or creating my own like I did earlier today by using the mesh?

Ok thanks everyone, sorry for the long e-mail. I am very, very excited to start getting creative with this software! Goodnight.

2

hi m8, start with understanding what is uv mapping, you can do texture cords by hand but it’s much handy to do that in 3d software. Then you have to learn how to connect to your box another renderer witch haves only quads and matches your uv!

3

Hey thank you very much I’ll research UV mapping and see if I can find any noob guides.

The “Texture Coordinates” pin on the “VertexBuffer” node… Is each set of x/y coordinates associated with a polygon that is assigned on the “Mesh” node? Because otherwise I am not clear why there is not a z coordinate.

Thanks again!

4

Texture Coordinates are the coordinates of a texture onto a face, therefore are just 2d.

Amon Tobin s show was programmed with Touch Designer but we ll know that vvvv > TD …

As antokhio said doing a proper mapping of texture for non-primitive mesh is usually more easily accomplished in an external 3D editing software, you hsould really look into Blender. http://www.blender.org

and welcome

5

hey snowfro. nice to hear that amon tobin inspired you so much.

you are almost right… texture coordinates tell which pixel on a texture (ranging from 0 , 0 left top corner to 1 , 1 right bottom corner)should be sampled on the vertices of your geometry.

e: io was 10 minutes faster due to timetravel

6

Haha time travel… I wish I could time travel back to some of the vvvv workshops that have been hosted…

OK io I will happily embrace blender but ultimately I would like to map the output of a vvvv render node onto the surface of the cube therefore that is where I am most confused because I fail to understand how I will be able to set up the output of a renderer in an alternate program like blender.

tekcor I even bought his media kit ($200+) which is really nice actually comes with DVD of his ISAM set and 7 CDs of his amazing feats of sound engineering, plus VINYL of all of his music! It is really nice. Regarding the texture coordinates, I have trouble because when I build a box manually with vertexbuffer and mesh it is made of triangles with three vertexes each which seems to cause a problem because I am specifying the coordinates of a triangle yes? Not a square with a top left and bottom right corner. Unless I can merge these two triangles to make a square?