paperManu / splash

Mirror repository - Modular video-mapping software

Splash, a multi-projector video-mapping software

For a more complete documentation, go visit the official website.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Installation

Code contribution

Going forward

Introduction

About

Splash is a free (as in GPL) modular mapping software. Provided that the user creates a 3D model with UV mapping of the projection surface, Splash will take care of calibrating the videoprojectors (intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, blending and color), and feed them with the input video sources. Splash can handle multiple inputs, mapped on multiple 3D models, and has been tested with up to eight outputs on two graphic cards. It currently runs on a single computer but support for multiple computers is planned. It also runs on some ARM hardware, in particular NVIDIA Jetsons are known to work well with Splash.

Although Splash was primarily targeted toward fulldome mapping and has been extensively tested in this context, it can be used for virtually any surface provided that a 3D model of the geometry is available. Multiple fulldomes have been mapped, either by the authors of this software (two small dome (3m wide) with 4 projectors, a big one (20m wide) with 8 projectors) or by other teams. It has also been tested sucessfully as a more regular video-mapping software to project on buildings, or onto moving objects.

Splash can read videos from various sources amoung which video files (most common format and Hap variations), video input (such as video cameras, capture cards), NDI video feeds, and shmdata (a shared memory library used to make softwares from the SAT Metalab communicate between each others). An addon for Blender is included which allows for exporting draft configurations and update in real-time the meshes.

Licenses

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program uses external libraries, some of them being bundled in the source code repository (directly or as submodules). They are located in external, and are not necessarily licensed under GPLv3. Please refer to the respective licenses for details.

Authors

See AUTHORS.md

Project URL

This project can be found either on its official website, on the Gitlab repository or on Github.

Sponsors

This project is made possible thanks to the Society for Arts and Technologies (also known as SAT) as well as the Lab148 cooperative

How to use Splash

Dependencies

Splash relies on a few libraries to get the job done. The mandatory libraries are:

• External dependencies:
  • FFmpeg to read and write video files,
  • OpenGL, which should be installed by the graphic driver,
  • GSL (GNU Scientific Library) to compute calibration,
• External dependencies bundled as submodules:
  • GLFW to handle the GL context creation,
  • GLM to ease matrix manipulation,
  • Snappy to handle Hap codec decompression,
  • ZMQ to communicate between the various process involved in a Splash session,
  • cppzmq for its C++ bindings of ZMQ
  • JsonCpp to load and save the configuration,
• Dependencies built at compile-time from submodules:
  • doctest to do some unit testing,
  • ImGui to draw the GUI,
  • stb_image to read images.

Some other libraries are optional:

• External dependencies:
  • libshmdata to read video flows from a shared memory,
  • portaudio to read and output audio,
  • Python for scripting capabilities,
  • GPhoto to use a camera for color calibration.
• Dependencies built at compile-time from submodules:
  • libltc to read timecodes from an audio input,

Also, the Roboto font and the DSEG font family are used and distributed under their respective open source licenses.

By default Splash is built and linked against the libraries included as submodules, but it is possible to force it to use the libraries installed on the system. This is described in the next section.

Installation

Splash can be installed from a pre-built package, or compiled by hand. Newcomers are advised to try the packaged version first, and try to compile it if necessary only.

Install from packages

To install from the binary packages, please refer to Splash documentation.

Build from sources

You can also compile Splash by hand, especially if you are curious about its internals or want to tinker with the code (or even, who knows, contribute!). Note that although what follows compiles the develop branch, it is more likely to contain bugs alongside new features / optimizations so if you experience crash you can try with the master branch.

The packages necessary to compile Splash are the following:

• Ubuntu 20.04 and newer:

sudo apt install build-essential git-core cmake libxrandr-dev libxi-dev \
    mesa-common-dev libgsl0-dev libatlas3-base libgphoto2-dev libz-dev \
    libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev python3-dev yasm portaudio19-dev \
    python3-numpy libopencv-dev libjsoncpp-dev libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev \
    libavutil-dev libswscale-dev

# Non mandatory libraries needed to link against system libraries only
sudo apt install libglfw3-dev libglm-dev libsnappy-dev libzmq3-dev

• Fedora 39:

If not already installed, add the RPM Fusion additional package repository (needed for some of the following dependencies). This only adds the free repository:

sudo dnf install https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Then install the dependencies:

sudo dnf install gcc g++ cmake gsl-devel atlas-devel libgphoto2-devel python3-devel \
    yasm portaudio-devel python3-numpy opencv-devel jsoncpp-devel libuuid-devel \
    libX11-devel libXrandr-devel libXinerama-devel libXcursor-devel libXi-devel \
    mesa-libGL-devel libavcodec-free-devel libavformat-free-devel libavutil-free-devel \
    libswscale-free-devel

• Archlinux (not well maintained, please signal any issue):

pacman -Sy git cmake make gcc yasm pkgconfig libxi libxinerama libxrandr libxcursor jsoncpp \
    mesa glm gsl libgphoto2 python3 portaudio zip zlib ffmpeg opencv qt5-base vtk hdf5 glew

Once everything is installed, you can go on with building Splash. To build and link it against the bundled libraries:

git clone https://gitlab.com/splashmapper/splash
cd splash
./make_deps.sh
mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc) && sudo make install

Otherwise, to build Splash and link it against the system libraries:

git clone https://gitlab.com/splashmapper/splash
cd splash
mkdir -p build && cd build
cmake -DUSE_SYSTEM_LIBS=ON ..
make -j$(nproc) && sudo make install

You can now try launching Splash:

splash --help

If you want to have access to realtime scheduling within Splash, you need to create a group "realtime", add yourself to it and set some limits:

sudo addgroup realtime
sudo adduser $USER realtime
sudo cp ./data/config/realtime.conf /etc/security/limits.d/

And if you want the logs to be written to /var/log/splash.log:

sudo adduser $USER syslog

Then log out and log back in.

If you want to specify some defaults values for the objects, you can set the environment variable SPLASH_DEFAULTS with the path to a file defining default values for given types. An example of such a file can be found in data/config/splashrc

And that's it, you can move on to the First steps page.

Uninstall Splash (when built from sources)

To uninstall Splash when built from sources, you need to do from the very same directory where Splash has been built:

cd ${PATH_TO_SPLASH}/build
sudo make uninstall

Code contribution

Contributions are welcome ! See CONTRIBUTING.md and CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md for details.

Going forward

To learn how to configure and use Splash, the best resource is its official website.