{"id":1296,"date":"2021-08-06T22:35:00","date_gmt":"2021-08-06T22:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/?p=1296"},"modified":"2025-12-27T22:58:35","modified_gmt":"2025-12-27T22:58:35","slug":"volumetric-led-display","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/?p=1296","title":{"rendered":"Volumetric LED display"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>For the Dubai Expo 2020 we faced the challenge of creating a wide range of 3D content for a volumetric display made from hundreds of LED rods. As no authoring system existed for this type of display, I created an authoring and pre-visualisation system in TouchDesigner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>3D animations were created in TD to support each scene in a story of green transformation. These were sliced up using a complex network of replicated nodes, in 3 axis, x,y,z. Each slice was mapped to pixels in an image so that a sequence of images would be used as an animated video to drive the LED controller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video controls src=\"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Ch2-Walk-Through.mp4\"><\/video><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The same compressed images could be fed into or played back through another TD network to visualise the animations in realtime in a simulated LED rod setup, identical to the physical display. This allowed us to fine-tune the visuals as well as the LED rod layout before the display was constructed on site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This was probably the most complex TD project I had worked on at the time, learnt loads of new techniques and it was great to see the volumetric display lighting up the room at the Expo, the LEDs playing back the animation sequences in time to the audio story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-video\"><video controls src=\"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Touchdesigner-behind-the-scenes-development-node-layout.mp4\"><\/video><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the Dubai Expo 2020 we faced the challenge of creating a wide range of 3D content for a volumetric display made from hundreds of LED rods. As no authoring system existed for this type of display, I created an authoring and pre-visualisation system in TouchDesigner. 3D animations were created in TD to support each&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1296"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1303,"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1296\/revisions\/1303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartcupit.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}