SHANHAI – Chinese cosmetic brand Marie Dalgar held its 7th annual crossover art exhibition, “Through Your Eyes,” in Shanghai where d3 media servers and 3D video mapping immersed visitors in a colorful, exotic city. This year, Marie Dalgar teamed up with French makeup artist Damien Dufresne on a show inspired by company founder Cui Xiaohong’s trip to Morocco.
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The 10-year old firm Marie Dalgar is well known for making connections between makeup and art. Its yearly art exhibition explores makeup from an artistic standpoint and showcases the work of selected international artists. Visitors to the exhibition at the CSSC Pavilion in Shanghai experienced an exotic city with eight different color zones.
The city’s Main Street was especially immersive, combining 3D video mapping of various makeup artworks with Dufresne’s own art pieces. Visitors followed a path through a three-dimensional city composed of a graceful arcade, a tower and cube-like buildings. Architectural details, maps, celestial imagery, Moorish tiles, swirling desert sands and abstract patterning were combined with women’s faces and projected onto Main Street creating an ever-changing cityscape.
To achieve the amazing visual effects Huelead, one of China’s top AV technology companies supplied two d3 4x4pro media servers while Redline, d3’s China reseller, furnished technical support for the project.
The d3 4x4pros were selected for a number of reasons, among them the ability to offer 16 HD outputs. “No other brand of server can compete with that,” says Steve Liu, Redline’s sales director. “When it comes down to the wire this advantage is far greater than just a number on a spec sheet. Initially, 27 projectors were used for the Main Street projection mapping. At a later stage the client suddenly added five more. But d3, with its tremendous output capabilities, allowed the entire project to be powered by just two 4x4pros without requiring an extra machine.”
The d3 workflow was also invaluable for the exhibition. “The Marie Dalgar project required the visualization of the projection effects prior to building the site and moving the AV equipment into the venue,” explains Redline’s technical manager Hank Liu. “With a traditional workflow, this would have been nearly impossible. But thanks to d3’s streamlined workflow and powerful d3 Designer, the 3D production team and d3 operator worked quickly as a team to finish the previz by mapping the model within the d3 environment. That meant more than half the work was completed before arriving on site.”
Chen Jieying, project director and deputy general manager at Huelead, gives kudos to d3 Designer, d3’s software-only version of the d3 production suite. “The software’s detailed operation design, various flexible adjustment toolkits and the performance of multiple video control gave us huge confidence,” he says.
“There are bound to be countless uncertainties when dealing with content mapping,” he continues. “For this project, there were some differences between the initial 3D model and the actual set. With the help of various content manipulation tools within d3 and the manual warping of output feeds on top of the QuickCal feature, the final outcome was modified. The result was another successful d3 project.”
At Huelead, Huang Mao was the d3 operator for “Through Your Eyes.” At Redline, Hu Jinfeng and Bao Zhen, joined Hank Liu and Steve Liu on the support team.
