Point at the structures in a photo of your stage and export a MadMapper project with them already traced.
Photo Mapper turns photos of the thing you have to map into a real MadMapper project. You load a photo, click the structures you want mapped, and R-Flow traces their outlines and lays them on a stage canvas as line surfaces. Export and you get a .mad that opens in MadMapper with geometry already following the real edges instead of a blank stage and a mouse. Clicking is the whole trick. Automatic detection sounds better until you point it at a white set against a bright sky: both are bright and washed out, so any brightness rule merges them and traces the skyline instead of the scenery. You already know which thing you came to map, so pointing at it is both faster and the only approach that reliably works. It writes MadMapper's own project format directly, not an SVG you import and rebuild: outputs, line surfaces with their bezier paths, and a textureable quad for every flat face it recognises. Load as many photos as the structure needs, including close-ups of small details, because one angle never covers a stage. Each photo is its own scan that you drag, scale and rotate against the others, and once they line up you can combine them into a single surface. Tell it how many projectors you are feeding and at what resolution and the outputs are laid out for you.
Click a structure in the photo and R-Flow selects it by colour, keeping only the piece you clicked so a cloud the same white as your set does not come along. Shift-click removes a region. The selection is tinted over the photo as you go, so you see exactly what will be traced before anything is.
Drag on the photo and you're painting with a brush: painted areas are in the trace no matter what detection thinks, shift-painted areas are out. It exists for the parts with no reliable colour or edge at all -- a pale branch against a pale sky -- so the picker finishes every selection itself. Nobody should ever need Photoshop to prep a photo.
Tick “Match everywhere” and a single click grabs every region that colour, not just the piece under the cursor. A set built from separate finials, cut-outs and trim becomes one click instead of twenty. It will also grab anything else that colour, which is what shift-click is for.
Photo Mapper writes MadMapper's project format directly, so the file opens as a finished project with its outputs, surfaces and paths in place. Every project is round-tripped through R-Flow's own reader before it lands on disk, which is the check that keeps a malformed file from ever reaching MadMapper.
Take a close-up of each part of the structure, trace each, place them against each other on the stage canvas, then tick them and hit Combine. They fuse into one surface with the alignment you just did baked in, exactly, to the last decimal.
Any outline that reduces to four convex corners and still explains its own area becomes a real quad surface as well as an outline, so you can drop content on the face immediately. The area check stops an L-shaped wall or a tree cut-out being flattened into a solid rectangle that covers the gaps.
The stage canvas draws each scan's photo dimmed behind its outlines, so a wrong trace is obvious in R-Flow instead of on site. Detected faces draw filled and outlines draw as lines, each scan in its own colour, so overlapping geometry stays tellable apart.
Set how many projectors you are feeding and pick a resolution or type your own, and the outputs are written into the project laid left to right at the right stage size. The canvas draws them as you would see them in MadMapper, so you can tell which projector a scan lands on before you export.
Shoot the thing you have to map from every angle you need geometry for, and take close-ups of any small or fiddly parts. Flat, even light and a straight-on angle trace best.
Add Photos takes as many as you like at once and opens each in the picker in turn.
Click each structure. The selection tints over the photo as you go. Shift-click a region to drop it, drag Tolerance if the selection is grabbing too much or too little, and tick “Match everywhere” when the set is made of many small separate pieces. Then hit Trace Selection.
Under Output, choose how many projectors you are feeding and their resolution. The stage canvas redraws to match, so you can see the area you actually have to fill.
Drag a scan to move it, pull a corner handle to scale, use the round handle above it to rotate, and nudge with the arrow keys. Line each photo up against the others until the details agree.
Tick the scans that belong together and hit Combine Ticked. They fuse into one surface keeping exactly the alignment you just set.
Adjust Detail and the minimum outline size and hit Retrace Selected. Your picks and your placement both survive, so you can keep tuning after you have lined everything up. Re-pick Structures reopens the picker with your existing clicks if you want to change what is selected.
Export MadMapper Project writes the .mad. Open it in MadMapper and your surfaces are already there, following the real edges.
| Tolerance (in the picker) | How close in colour a pixel has to be to what you clicked. Raise it when a selection stops short of the edges, lower it when it bleeds into the background. It is judged in CIELAB, so it tracks how different two colours actually look rather than how different their numbers are. |
|---|---|
| Match everywhere (in the picker) | Off by default: a click takes only the connected piece under it. On, a click takes every region of that colour in the photo. Use it for a set made of many small separate pieces. A shift-click removal is always scoped to the piece you click, whatever this is set to. |
| Brush (in the picker) | Drag paints, a plain press is still a click. The slider or the mouse wheel sets the brush size, shift-drag or right-drag erases, and Undo steps back through strokes and clicks alike. Painted pixels are authoritative: use the brush wherever the automatic selection can't see what you can. |
| Projectors | How many video outputs to write into the project, from one to eight. They are laid out left to right around stage centre, the way MadMapper arranges a fresh multi-head rig. |
| Resolution | The output resolution each projector runs at. Presets from 1024x768 up to 4K, or Custom for anything else. It sets each output's stage size, so getting it right is what makes the canvas match what you will see in MadMapper. |
| Detail | How closely a traced path follows the contour it came from. Low gives blocky outlines with few points that are quick to adjust by hand; high keeps close to the photo and gives you far more nodes. Small steps in an outline, like a lintel standing slightly proud of the wall behind it, only survive at higher detail. |
| Ignore outlines under | Drops any outline shorter than this fraction of the selection. Measured against what you picked, not the whole photo, so a small prop in a wide shot keeps its detail instead of vanishing under the threshold. |
| Also make quads for flat faces | On by default. Emits a textureable quad surface for every outline that came back as a clean four-cornered face, alongside its traced outline. Turn it off if you only want lines. |
| Show photos | Draws each scan's photo dimmed behind its outlines on the stage canvas. On by default, because outlines on a black canvas are almost impossible to sanity-check. |
| Combine Ticked | Fuses the ticked scans into one surface, baking in where you placed them. Enabled once two or more are ticked. Scans you did not tick are left alone. |
| Re-pick Structures | Reopens the picker for the selected scan with your existing clicks and tolerance, so you can add or drop regions without starting over. |
| Retrace Selected | Re-runs the trace on the selected scan with the current Detail and size settings, replaying the same picks and keeping its placement. Alignment is the expensive part of this job and a retrace must never throw it away. |
| Fallback detection | Auto, Bright structure, Dark structure and Edges run the old heuristic detection with no clicking. Kept for photos where the subject is genuinely isolated. Auto cannot separate a white set from a bright sky, so if the trace comes back following your skyline, that is why, and picking is the answer. |
| Reset Placement | Returns the selected scan to stage centre at scale 1 with no rotation, for when a drag has gone somewhere you cannot see. |