The creative lighting and visual design specialist Painting with Light has created a permanent 3D projection mapping artwork for the Hangar 58 event space at Bokrijk in Limburg, an historic landmark and popular open air museum.
Hangar 58 owner Wim Grommers approached Painting with Light’s Luc Peumans about creating storyboards, video artwork and a library of standard content for clients renting the space.
The idea is that guests can view the show through the large glass walls of the modern Hanger 58 in the winter and enjoy the large format show standing outside in the summer.
When running, the projection images measure approximately 40m long and 20m tall. They cover a series of different shaped buildings set at 90° to one another in one of the historic villages replicated at Bokrijk.
Peumans commented: “It’s great to see someone with the foresight and imagination to invest in a show like this and of course I am extremely proud that it’s happening in my home town and base of Genk, continuing the creative spirit of the area with a new technical direction.”
Painting with Light undertook a complete 3D scan of the building facades before creating the multi-million pixel ‘map’ and then Peumans and his team, including Bart Tauwenberg from New Solid, started work on the content.
“Having the two separate surfaces offers great possibilities to split the images and tell the story with contrasting and complimentary images,” explained Peumans. “And while that presents a challenge to get the harmony between the two elements just right, it’s also great to be able to have a dual narrative running.”
Peumans specified a d3 4×2 pro media server which stores and runs the content, mapping it millimetre-perfect to the buildings. He chose d3 for its mapping capabilities and also because they could take advantage of its inbuilt 3d visualiser to present an accurate replication of the proposed finished product for sign off by the client.
Peumans commissioned Jo Pauly and Michel Stroobants from Visual Solutions to complete the d3 media server programming and projector alignment.
The projections are fed by two Digital Projection Titan Quartz 20K machines which were delivered by FACE (Foundation for Audio-Visual Commerce Engineering), and a d3 reseller for Benelux. Both projectors are located inside Hangar 58, one pointing directly at one set of building surfaces and the other firing across at a 45° angle.
