Bitmaps and video

#1

I had a look around, but didn’t find anything relevant… Is PB purely for algorithmically generated sequences, or are there ways to incorporate /stream bitmap or (suitably low resolution) video data to the pixel mapper?

Being a professional 3d artist, I can generate pretty much any image, movement or texture I desire in my software, and given i am a complete beginner at coding and have the maths skills of a mid level 10 year old, being able to use some of my current skillset would be amazing.

#2

Yes, folks have done bitmaps before several ways, but all are currently going to require a fair bit of coding. I was able to find a few of the more notable threads by searching the forums for “bitmap”. The threads that jumped out to me are:

  1. Pixie’s work in Python for rendering images: Rendering images and extracting from a .GIF: Beating Heart Pattern - #6 by GeekMomProjects
  2. zranger1’s ExpanderVerse, for generating images on a computer. Processing is good at working with image data: ExpanderVerse: Processing, Output Expanders, Many, many LEDs

What 3D software do you work in primarily?

#3

If you want to play a video file from a computer onto a Pixelblaze, there is a command-line Python tool…

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#4

Oh I’m very excited to get my pixelblaze now… I’ve only asked a handful of questions “but can it. ?”. And the answer seems to be yes to basically everything!

I appreciate that I’m not going to find anything “code free”. However it’s one thing to learn how to get content I’m comfortable producing onto those pixels, and quite another learning how to create that content from scratch using entirely different tools.

I use 3dsmax/vray/aftereffects/photoshop mostly…

I am now fantasising about using fluid and particle simulations from chaos phoenix/tyflow Vdb volumetric data files
( https://www.openvdb.org/) would probably lend themselves quite well to 3d pixel grids…!