Structured Rain

Context and Role

Structured Rain was presented for three nights at APOG Music Festival in Darrington, Washington. The log sat in a forest nook along a main thoroughfare between stages, where festivalgoers discovered the piece on their walk through the woods.

I developed the concept, real-time visuals, structured-light scanning workflow, projection mapping, and projector-to-laser calibration system.

Challenge

An irregular natural object is already difficult to projection-map: it is non-planar, textured, and hard to register by hand. Structured Rain added a second alignment problem. The projected imagery and laser output had to share the same reconstructed geometry, remain registered with each other, and stay precisely attached to the log. The workflow needed enough accuracy to make both layers read as one coherent system on the surface.

System

Structured Rain runs on LightStruct, my structured-light scanning and projection/laser mapping system. The system captures the log’s surface using structured-light patterns, reconstructs its geometry, and maps visual content back into projector and laser coordinate spaces.

On Site

The installation ran from dark until sunrise each night. Scanning, calibration, and masking took about 15 minutes on site. A companion iPad app masked the projection and laser output to the log itself.

TouchDesigner Integration

For production use, I built custom TouchDesigner C++ TOP, POP, and CHOP operators that bring LightStruct’s scanning, calibration, geometry, and control data directly into the live TouchDesigner workflow. This allows capture, reconstruction, visual generation, mapping, and output to stay inside a real-time creative environment.