PROJECTOR PROCRASTINATION.

To be accurate I haven't been procrastinating about projectors but delaying writing some script to get a few balloons to dance to music. I was sick and tired of listening to 'Happy Birthday' or more accurately analysing the wave form of Happy Bloody Birthday. Blender doesn't have an audio analyser so I have to skip between Audacity and Blender. I wanted a simple diversion. I got to playing with a projector whatsit method in Blender, this only works in the Cycles render engine and not in EEVEE as it uses Nodes on a light source, EEVEE doesn't support this.....Hark at me! I can remember the time when nodes were an arcane art. I also recall being bamboozled by PS Elements. It's only practise as the doctors say as they practise in their practices.

I found an image on PIXABAY of a pretty young lady and decided to project her onto a quick bit of bumpy stuff.

Here is the quick bit of bumpy stuff. It isn't really this colour, Blender will do this for you with a couple of clicks. It doesn't affect the final render and does make me look both with it and considerate of my audience. I have only known a few abnormal folk that don't like animals and colouring in, without exception they were socialists.

Here is the young lady. There was a snap of a better one but the image was a bit dark. 

I'm away to the CO-OP for some grapes. Bugger the blog post and bugger Blender.

Here is my lighter choice projected onto the bumpy thing. As you can see it's very noisy.

Here she is rendered with 550 samples which isn't enough two thousand would be nearer the mark, this takes my machine about seven minutes or were it a video frame about thirty hours for a ten second clip. It's still noisy. I then recalled reading on a 'Blender Talking in Tongues' forum that there is a new de-noiser in Blender 2.81. It does a good job this is rendered with only fifty samples or thereabouts, popped in the compositor and de-noised, then re-rendered in seconds. I forgot to make a note of the render time but about a couple of minutes tops for both renders and a comparable result.

See.

It isn't quite as sharp, about evens or better for noise. I have plenty to mess about with other than increasing sampling. I could stop smoking in the virtual projection room and cinema for a start. Having said that I like a bit of noise in an image but it is far easier to pop some back than it is to get rid of it.

This is the node set up, quite simple. The render as you can see is not fifty but fifty five. I have used a still image but Render Layers which is the input will happily accept a quick and dirty video render. There are a few little hiccups on the way to this so if anyone is interested I will do a video 'HOW TO'.  You can sweep the projection over any 3D model....A flat plane might be best, these are in sharp focus but if you cuckoo and want a bit of blur then that is only a slider away.

It has kept me amused. I just wish I had the space for a really big posh monitor. 

I saw a YouTube thingy showing a roomful of anally retentive nerds doing this sort of malarkey and everyone of them had two three foot screens and a nice seat. The lassy second from the right had such a wonderful seat I never did get to the bottom of the discussion. Call themselves computer virtual visual artists. Rubbish they are, she ought to have been front and centre. You don't ever see the Hoffs lady from the Bangles getting swapped for a monitor screen whilst some vegan soy boy bangs on about light levels, sound levels, focus, f-stops and composition. The proper image makers know instinctively what to focus on. Susanna Hoffs's bottom. 

Have a good week and have fun.