Two nDisplay Screens on Single Machine

With the nature of our project, we need to display two different renders on two different screens during the exhibition. I know nDisplay can work with multiple screens (literally how all LED screens work), then in theory, it should be able to put different renders on multiple screens. I have a few different ideas on how to achieve this (some more optimized than others) but this week I started with the most simple way I could think of.

In the existing nDisplay configuration, I created a new nDisplay screen and positioned it perpendicular to the existing one. Because I had the first screen in the top-left quadrant of my screen, I decided to put the second one on the top-right for testing purposes. After creating the screen, I made sure the dimensions and the position were set correctly.

According to nDisplay, the top-left corner of my screen is the (0,0) position. Because the first screen already takes up 960x540 pixels, the second one needs to be positioned 960 pixels to the right. Otherwise, most of the settings were the same as before.


Though everything should have been set correctly, when I launched nDisplay, I realized my laptop screen was not divided into quadrants as I calculated. The end result looked like this, where it's easy to see that the second image was being cut off:


After spending more than an hour trying to calculate the pixels on my screen and to figure out why simple math was this hard, I realized the issue was due to the display settings on my laptop, heh... My display scale was set to 125% (as the recommended setting) and it was messing up nDisplay screen size when it launched.


Dropping the display scale to 100% and relaunching nDisplay quickly led to the desired result! Now both screens were positioned as needed and showing different views of the scene.


I have noticed some issues with the angle of the second screen not perfectly matching its angle in the viewport, I think this might be because I only had one camera in my setup but 2 screens. I need to keep testing to optimize the setup and also make sure everything will work correctly in the studio.

Because I was only using a single screen on my laptop, my setup was less complicated than what I would be using for the final exhibition. In theory, everything should work the same but I need to do more testing with the actual equipment in the studio and make sure everything works as intended. That's the plan for tomorrow!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New Idea: Audio Commands for Lighting

Image
An idea that struck me out of nowhere this week was the ability to control DMX lights through voice commands. I'm thinking that in a one-woman show in a studio, different lighting pre-sets could be created in advance. And during the show, Unreal could be listening for voice commands and switch programs based on the words/phrases. I don't think Unreal Engine has an inherent voice recognition program. However, I found this free plugin in the Unreal Store and it somewhat looks promising. Apart from Unreal's store, I've found that some people had success using Meta's voice recognition in the engine. I'm not yet sure which plugin they used or how they set it up, but I think it's a promising option to follow if the Runtime Speech Recognizer plugin doesn't work. I'm planning to also reach out to another student in Drexel who has experience with Meta's voice recognition and get some feedback for my project!
Read more

CRMX Finally Works!!

Image
The day has finally come!! CRMX finally works!!! :D I started my setup by unboxing our new CMRX transmitter and connecting it to power and to the Gateway box. This way, the transmitter should receive DMX data from Unreal and wirelessly send it over to Aputure lights. Setting up the transmitter didn't require any additional steps within Unreal since the DMX data has been long setup to be sent to all 4 ports of Gateway. This brand (Godox) also sells CRMX receivers that pair up easily with the transmitter. But those are mainly used for studio lights that do not already have CRMX capability. With Aputure lights, we didn't need to buy extra receivers. One receiver per light can get very expensive depending on the setup. Next, I worked on connecting the lights to the transmitter. This process was not as straightforward as I thought it would be. I had to do a lot of back-and-forth between resetting the light settings, activating CRMX, turning on the transmitter pairing, and hoping tha...
Read more

Ideas for the Project

Image
For the past few weeks, my team has been doing research and trying to finalize what kind of project we want to create for the DIGM 540 course this winter. Those of us who gathered in this team want to create an interactive art exhibit that will have elements of touch sensors, rear projection, and adaptive music. Currently, our idea is to have a performer in the middle of the stage who will be wearing touch sensors. As exhibit attendees come to the stage to touch and pose the performer, the pressure and location of their touch will trigger different effects and colors in the projection screen, as well as different moods of music. This idea came to be inspired by the artist Marina Abramovic's Rhythm 0 piece. We have not finalized what will actually be on screen, but I'm personally leaning toward abstract art with many elements of colors, particles, lines of varying thicknesses, etc.  I've found this exhibit by Adrien M & Claire B that has a lot of visual elements reactin...
Read more