Scene
The first stage of building a show: describing the room inside Backstage. The screens you project onto or light up, and — for projection — the projectors that cover them, placed as they are in reality.
Backstage renders each projector's output from this scene, so the closer it matches the room, the closer the image lands. It is also what the next person reads: someone who did not build the installation should be able to open the project and see what it is.
Start here: a display, or a projection?
Everything in this stage begins with one choice. Pick one route — you do not do all three.
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Choose it when |
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An LED wall, a monitor, a video wall — a screen addressed in pixels, with no projector. The simplest object there is, and the quickest route to something on screen. |
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Any projection onto a flat or cylindrical screen, including a single projector — set Projector Count to 1. The wizard builds the surface and its projectors already aimed, and its parameters stay editable afterwards: change distance, throw or count and the projectors still hit the screen. |
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The shapes the wizard cannot build — dome, disc, cube, sphere, torus or an imported 3D model. Build the surface and its projectors by hand, from measurements. |
Done when: the scene contains the screen and whatever lights it, sized and placed as in the room — and each projector's frustum in the 3D view covers its share of the surface.
Which one, for a single projector?
Both work. A display can be warped by hand, including on a curved screen, and blending is irrelevant when there is no overlap. So the decision is not about what is possible:
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A second projector may cover the same screen later. Blending needs projectors, and a display cannot be extended into one — that is a rebuild.
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You want camera-based calibration. CalibratorLite and Calibrator generate warp meshes and projector frustums. Neither applies to a display.
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The scene should describe the installation. A projector aimed at a surface tells the next person what the room looks like. A hand-warped display tells them nothing, and that knowledge stays with whoever set it up.
Where none of those apply, a display is less work and perfectly legitimate.
Still unsure which object you need? What is the difference between a Display and a Surface?
Mappings
Every surface and display carries a mapping — how content lands on it. One is created with the object and fills it, and a video channel in the Sequencer picks which mapping it renders through.
You only touch mappings when content has to land differently: a region rather than the whole screen, a perspective-correct placement, or a second layout on the same physical pixels.
Create an Additional Mapping on a Display
Projectors cover surfaces automatically
Every projector in a render group covers every surface in that group — there is nothing to assign. A new project already contains a group, and the wizard puts its surface and projectors in one, so this normally needs no thought at all.
The Surface/Projector Assignment window exists only to narrow that: when objects sit close together and one projector must not render a neighbouring surface. If you are looking for a step that connects projectors to a screen, there isn't one.
More options
Previewing LED content in the scene view, exporting a surface as an OBJ file, and pinning which mapping addresses a display's physical pixels:
Next
A scene renders nothing until its screens reach hardware, and a projection is not finished until the image is aligned:
Output — routing to physical outputs, and audio
Warp, Blend & Black Level — warping, blending and black level, for projection
Examples — complete builds: an LED facade, a dome, an L-shaped wall, a segmented screen