Positioning and compositing across multiple displays

Hi,

Oversimplifying a bit: Say I’m trying to move a series of “rectangles” across multiple displays in random directions and sometimes overlapping each other according to a predetermined priority. What is the best way to manage sizes, resolutions and changing positions?

What I’ve tried: A single window justified and offset to bounds of all displays (3 wide by 2 high at 1920x1080 each so 5760x2160 total). I then tried compositing all my rectangles using the composite TOP. This works but the composite TOP doesn’t allow adjusting the individual position of each of its inputs so the rectangles disappear as they move outside of the composite TOP’s bounds. Doesn’t seem to matter how I change resolution and fill viewer settings I can’t get all rectangles moving across all the displays.

I’ve seen an example in an other thread using containers to achieve a similar effect but I’m worried how the containers will affect performance once I have many “rectangles” running with movies, live video, web pages inside them. I would like to find a solution which scales well possibly using something like a replicator to generate all the “rectangles” from a table.

Thanks!

Thanks,

for the most flexibility and freedom I would suggest to make your scene in 3d.
Use Rectangle SOPs in Geo COMPs, and move the Geo COMPs tx/ty/tx around as far as you like.
Use a Render TOP of 5760x2160. Place a camera in Orthographics mode if you need the scene to look 2d.

Then you can texture each rectangle with image/movies/web pages etc.

Using Geo instancing you can animate as much textured rectangles as you want.

See a basic example how to set this up under Help->Operator Snippets → COMP ->Geometry and then the second example called “texture instancing”

Thanks! Seems to be working very well so far! Smooth motion and a steady 60fps regardless of how many sources I throw at it.

EDIT: posted this as a separate thread here.

One additional question: In the “texture instancing” snippet how would I go about replacing the individual MovieIn OPs with Base OPs or any other form of container that would allow me to cleanly nest sub networks?

I tried using a Base OP with the network I want inside it and adding an Out TOP but this doesn’t seem to get rendered like the other Tops are.

Thanks again!