Projection mapping is the backbone technique of contemporary installation art — it’s what runs the cathedral facades at festivals like Zsolnay, covered here recently, and half the gallery installations this site writes about. MadMapper is the tool most working practitioners reach for first. MadMapper – Projection Mapping Basics, from Emily Bommarito, covers the fundamentals from zero: getting a projector recognized, creating your first mapped surfaces, and shaping them to real objects.
What to watch
The walkthrough covers the core MadMapper workflow: setting up the projector as an output, creating quad surfaces, and — the heart of the craft — warping each surface’s corners and edges until the projected geometry sits exactly on the physical object it’s meant to cover. From there it’s about feeding those surfaces content, whether video files, live inputs, or MadMapper’s own generators, and understanding how the input-to-surface routing lets one composition drive many mapped shapes.
The concept that makes everything click
Projection mapping is two separate geometry problems, and beginners conflate them. The input side decides which slice of your content each surface displays; the output side decides where that slice lands in physical space. MadMapper’s interface is literally split along this line. Once you internalize that the warping you do on the output side is compensating for the projector’s position — not editing the content — the whole practice stops being mysterious. A cube mapped from an off-axis projector is just five quads, each output-warped until the illusion holds from the audience’s vantage point.
Where to go next
The immediate next skills are edge blending for multi-projector coverage and MadMapper’s spatial scanner, which uses a camera to automate the geometry-matching this tutorial does by hand. For content, everything this site covers on the generative side feeds directly in: TouchDesigner and Hydra both send video to MadMapper via Syphon or Spout, meaning the livecoded and node-based visuals from those tutorials can drive physical surfaces instead of screens. That pipeline — generative tool into mapping tool into architecture — is the standard stack behind most of the large-scale work covered here, and it starts with the quad-warping fundamentals in this video.