Town of Cary 150th
“Journey Through a Dream of Light”
“Journey Through a Dream of Light”, an immersive experience of light, art and technology. Watch as North Carolina digital artists and producers transform the Cary Art Center into a large-scale outdoor projection exhibit of color and light.
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Journey Through a Dream of Light
The project “Journey Through a Dream of Light” was executive produced by Mike Cuales of LEVR studios, Alex Mengel, and featured Robin Vuchnich as a featured artist who also scored the projects soundtrack.
The mayor of Cary, Harold Weinbrecht, announced the event, before the showing.
Rhett Hissam projected beatifically depicted plant life creations using Tilt Bush VR and also served as the projects Creative Director. Pat Fitzgerald an Associate Professor in the Department of Art + Design in the College of Design at NC State University created a surreal collage interspersed throughout the 15 minute projected animation. Mistro productions provided the A/V support lead by Brandon Scopel.
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Our Contributions
We coordinated the technical oversight of the project and produced both the intro and outro animations using Cary, North Carolina based, worldwide renowned, Unreal Engine by Epic Games, and the recently released Unreal Engine 5 as one of our main tools. Our creative collective produced content for the intro (0:00-1:40) and outro (11:11-14:00) and designed the projects technical pipeline and creative workflow.
We also used Mad Mapper, Cinema 4D, Substance Painter, After Effects, Projecting Matter in our software pipeline. The project was rendered in 6K and projected using 4 x 30K Christie projectors on the Cary Art Center.
Behind the Scenes – 3D video mapping on building façade.
We started with Photogrammetry scan created in Reality Capture.
An architecturally accurate real-world scale Cinema 4D model was then created.
A camera view was rendered from C4D that did not have any distortion in the angle or lens characteristics to make sure the content created would align properly on the buildings façade.
The software Mapping Mapper was used to visualize the technical layout of the projectors and make sections in lens. Four projectors were used for coverage of the back-wall, gable, columns, and a fill projector to cover shadows.
The 3D model was textured using Substance Painter that provided several interesting looks including surreal coral, gold and nostalgic wood that resembled the Cary Art Center when it was a high school.
Unreal Engine 5
The pre release version Unreal Engine 5 was used for content creation and pre visualization. We were able to get real-time feedback throughout the design and rendering process. The scenes were animated directly in sequencer and rendered in 6K resolution from the perceptive of the camera imported from C4D.
One of the tasks was to create a template and workflow for all the collaborating 2D and 3D artists to use. For this we used Crytomattes which delivered a robust matte solution for compositing that automatically generates mattes allowing the artists to easily select the parts of the building facade to layer animation on with a click of a mouse instead of the tedious task of drawing masks over each element.
The project was video mapped on the building used Mad Mapper. The playback was driving (2) 6K video feeds and (4) 4K outputs on a high end PC.
We would like to thank the people of the Town of Cary, LEVR studios, Mistro Productions and the collaborating artists that helped realized “The Journey Through a Dream of Light” projector mapping project.
