This is a great project I am very proud to share. I worked under the supervision of Emanuele Lomello, the exhibit consists of a giant parallelepipedal single controlled led matrix, in simple words, a led screen with a depth.

More in detail, the system is composed of 3024 leds which are parts of 6 DMX universes, so every led can be singularly controlled and dimmed.

The Matrix is completely handmade under our specification by a company from Turin named Light Solutions. It is an amazingly incredible work, realized with extreme patience and ability.

So, we have 3024 leds and we need a software to control them. Here is where I did my best. I created a tool in Unity for converting 3D animations and particle systems in something that can be played by the matrix.

I created an optimized a system that can manage to animate inside a Virtual Led Matrix in real time, so the creators can easily see the result of what they’re doing without continuously have to move around the exhibit. Plus, the system is based on voxels, which means that it can easily manage fading from the inside to the outside of the volumetric shapes. After all the editing is completed, you only have to insert the time length that you want to record and press play, with this system, you will end up with a stabilization of the framerate and a resulting file without speed variations or frames drop.

The system produces a .txt file with the value for every led of the 6 DMX Universes, and it saves these informations for every frame that needs to be “rendered”.

Then with a resulting MaxMsp Software we could directly control the Matrix Brain, an Art Net Node combined with a Enttec E-Streamer MKII, with the first module we control the leds using the dmx over the ethernet protocol, the cool thing is that we can control this in real time, so this exhibit can be used during live events in the future, but for now thanks to the streamer it plays different clips timed during the day.

I can’t stop saying this is a really great project, it allowed me to work with wonderful people and to learn a lot. I worked as Unity Developer and it took to me two weeks to develop by myself the system.