volta is a 3D app, coming from immersive VR. i find that so interesting. it’s not what I’m used to, VJ software like vdmx and resolume are 2D, like photoshop. so how to leverage what I know into this new world?
this isn’t just a me-thing. 3D is hard, and what people bring to volta is 2D, say a logo or folder of videos. seemed to me there’s a real product challenge here, in getting people to do cool stuff in 3D with a kind of 2D skill-set. the latest release has a lot of work from me on that. and so with the release, a ten minute demo from me. here in the diary, as a transcript and four stills.
Volta Create 0.12
One of the focuses of this release is doing more with 2D imagery. Getting you, with your webcam, your images and your videos, into the 3D world.
Here I’ve built a little kind of stage set out of three images. In this case a webcam, you’re seeing the webcam placeholder.
The first new thing here is that we have an element that’s suited for getting your stuff into the world. It’s called the surface.
And so the first thing to say about the surface is that it respects transparency. So I’m going to take that one at the back, copy it, paste it and now I’m going bring it to the front.
I’m using the Gizmo feature that’s also new in 0.12.
And now on this surface we can set to a PNG that I’ve got in here that is transparent. Already that’s looking nice in 3D.
That’s just a transparent PNG. You can make those in your image editing program, to make frames and all sorts.
But we can do more than that…
I’ve got these two surfaces on the side, and I’m going to set these to a different visual source. I’ve got that webcam but on these, you can see that there’s some transparency too.
So we have in 0.12 a whole new kind of image keying, masking kind of thing going on.
On this visual source, it’s just a webcam again. But here I’ve got an image key on it. I’ve added this image key and I’m using another visual source as the mask. That’s just a black and white image that’s masking it up.
And so all of a sudden, we’ve got this whole kind of thing that really truly exists in 3D, but we’ve built it just out of simple flat images.…continued in next post