Lighting up our first prototype
Three lighting tests with our cotton prototype: external flashes, an LED matrix inside it, and the first mapped day cycle.
After pulling the cotton through the mesh, we had our first opportunity to test it under different internal and external lighting conditions.
Lighting it from outside
We took the cotton prototype and hung it in my office, where I have my default Funiki lighting setup: Philips Hue lights mapped to the Funiki engine I developed in Godot.
Streaming a lightning storm through Funiki
For the lightning test, the Funiki engine developed by Michael Anslow was used to stream HDRI footage of a storm to the mapped Philips Hue bulbs. The interface footage and the physical cloud show the source and its lighting response together.
From there I could apply some of the different lighting conditions I had already programmed into the Funiki system and see how each one changed the mood of the prototype. This one was an AI-generated war zone created by generating keyframes.
An LED matrix inside the prototype
We also experimented with putting the LED matrix from before inside the cloud and streaming some of the moving noise across the cloud. I like how it looks like the cloud is subtly moving despite being static.
Mapping from the inside
Next we mapped the LEDs from inside the cloud. For this we used fairy lights pushed through the cloud from outside, with cotton then pulled through around them. I created LED mapping software for this using an ellipsoid as an approximate shape and indicated where each LED was placed.
To test this first digital twin, I added a day-and-night cycle using moon and sun light sources moving through the scene, and streamed values to the LEDs from virtual light sensors placed on the ellipsoid.