Learn what projection mapping masking in QLab is, and how we can use it ourselves.
Traditional Projection
Projectors normally a rectangular image. And we can normally corner pin and warp this to fit our surface. But this is generally limited to geometric shapes. From our childhood know we cant fit a square peg into a round hole. So what do we do if we want to projection map a circle? One way we could solve this issue is by cutting out the same shape in a piece of cardboard and use it to block the unneeded parts of the image. And while this technically works, there is a much better way.
Circle Mask
We can create an image the size of our surface called a mask. This image will be white for whatever we want to allow the projection to show on and black for anything we want to block from being projected on. This acts like our cardboard from earlier except much better. Let’s jump onto QLab and apply this to our surface!
PLEASE WATCH VIDEO ABOVE FOR TUTORIAL
You can also use masking to do some pretty neat foreground and background content. I cut this piece into a random shape and drew some more abstract shapes inside of it. Using my graphics software I masked out the surface and the shapes. By taking the mask and inverting it we can create two different surfaces, one for the foreground and one for the background and assign whatever we want to it…… Neat! Masking is a great tool in the projection mapping toolbox since it allows us the designer to define exactly what we want to project on, no matter how complex the geometry.
