Learning to Align

So amidst all of our experiments and conceptual designs, properly aligning 3d objects within maya with there real world counterparts has been an arduous process. It goes something like this, Rotate, tweak, rotate, tweak, forever and ever until it is close. There is also the painstaking process of rendering out stills so we can full screen them and see if they align. Basically a long long process. Matt and Ben recently created a jitter patch/program that would allow us to isolate only our renderable area from maya and full screen it through the projector for real time alignment. As nice as it is, we still need to figure out how to accurately align camera/projector settings. Matt, Ben and I spent a few hours yesterday trying to figure this stuff out.

The scene we set up was simple. We decided to calculate a straight on projection to begin with so we only had to worry about a single face. I measured our physical box and created an accurate replica in maya.

1.77.75" wide, 30" high and 18"deep

2.Then we measured the distance from the projector lens to the box so we could properly position the digital camera.

3.Either measure the projectors angle of view or find out its focal length via. manual (AOV and FL seem to adjust to each other)

4.Make sure digital camera's resolution and film aspect ration match the projector settings. We used 1024x768 and 1.33 or 4:3.

5.The sketchiest part for me at this point is the camera aperture. I/we need to further understand what it is and what it controls. It seems to affect multiple settings in maya and needs to be adjusted accordingly. We could not find the projectors aperture setting so we found a formula online and used it to figure it out. This was much more Ben's area than mine and I still do not fully understand the process.

We came very close to aligning the box/projection yesterday. There are so many working factors that a small error in a single step could account for our miscalculations. Or there is another aspect we haven't found yet that is the culprit.