I spent 30 years as a developer, but my hardest project was just making my house look cool for the holidays.
For a long time, the biggest wall I hit in projection mapping wasn’t the hardware or the mapping software—it was the content creation. Every new theme meant starting from a blank canvas: the concept, the video loops, the props, and the textures. It was the most draining part of every project, and it’s the exact bottleneck that stops most people from ever getting started.
I’ve been a software developer for 31 years, and eventually, I just got tired of the friction. I wanted to focus on the projection, not staring at an empty timeline. So, I built FacadeThemes.
The story behind it:
I started as a neighborhood hobbyist (HeavyM Ambassador) who wanted to do something better than the standard inflatables. It took months perfecting the "full-stack" setup—weatherproof rigs, autonomous PCs, FM audio, the works—but the asset creation remained a manual slog.
FacadeThemes is the tool I spent the last several months building to solve that. You upload a photo of your house, and the system uses an AI-powered pipeline to propose complete themes and generate the ready-to-map assets: structural props, transparent layers, kinetic video loops, and curated soundtracks.
Everything comes out as standard files, so it drops right into HeavyM, MadMapper, or whatever mapping tool you’re already running.
I’m really curious to get some eyes on this from folks who are actually in the trenches with their own facades. It’s live at facadethemes.com if you want to try an upload and see the automation in action.
I’d love to hear your thoughts—what’s the one part of the mapping/content workflow you hate the most? I built this to kill the bottlenecks, so let me know what’s still slowing you down.
I have included some pictures of my work and the rig that I built for myself and my neighbor.