PGW200 - Assessment 3
Procedural Broadcast Animation
Concept: "Generative Art from Dance"
Module 9
Mood Board:
For this assessment, we are asked to visualise an emotion through design, motion and composition. The emotion I'd like to explore is playfulness. In week 9's class, I was enjoying working with lines and wanted to explore them further, maybe playing with vellum to get some fun animations. The last assessment's I did felt more serious but I'd like to try create something that looks fun, experimenting with colour, lighting and movement.
Module 10
Experimentation:
What I'd like to draw inspiration from for the movement I want to create are sea anemones. They move as if there is no gravity to hold them down and they seem light in weight. I think that the way they move is playful along with other features such as the bright luminescent colours, and some are translucent, that adds to the feeling of lightness.
On youtube I found a tutorial for vellum that I thought I could try to to get the sea anemone movement effect. I played around with the settings like the bend stiffness, gravity and wind to find a movement that I liked.
Link - https://youtu.be/c9R-XivYBto
Tests:
Bend Stiffness and Gravity
At first I thought of making each of the lines very wiggly, by putting the value of the bend stiffness at 1 x 0.00001 because the movement seemed fun, but then I found that instead, it looked a bit chaotic and too alien-like. It also made most of them bend down too low and I thought looking through the camera it wouldn't look the best. I then tried some other settings that were suggested in the video that I found and adjusted the stiffness value to get my ideal movement. However I was still finding that the tentacles were going too low, so I then changed the gravity value to 0.5 instead of 0 so that it wasn't too much to affect the way they moved, but it didn't make them fall down as low.
Shapes
This is one of the first experiments I did, copying the end points of the lines onto a small sphere. I wanted to test what it would look like as if the anemone tentacles were floating in the space. Although I like this idea, I think it isn't quite right to fit the emotion of playfulness. I think because the centre can get a little dense and packed it doesn't have that light feeling that I am after. If I lowered the amount of lines to make it not as dense it looks too empty.
I then tested out copying out the points to dome shape, which I think looked alright, but I didn't love how the tentacles reacted to each other with this shape.
The next version I tried was using a tube. I thought that if I used a rounded shape that the direction of the lines would face in the direction of the tube but that didn't happen. When I used a scatter points it made all the lines stay on the tube but point in the positive Y direction. I the remembered for assessment 2 with the jellies, we used an attribute randomise to make the direction of the point normals. With this shape I found I needed to add way points to copy to because the shape looked a bit sparse.
I added to the length of the tube, and added extra lines and made the material transmissive except that I was getting that dark issue in the middle. But I did like the shape and thought it looked nice.
I then tried to scatter less points to copy to to see if it wouldn't be as dark but I think she shape didn't have as great of an effect. I also tried changing the opacity to see if it would help, and it did to a degree but I didn't like the look.
In the images above you can see that even though I was using an attribute randomise to change the direction of the normals, the direction tended to favour the top of the shape and changing the global seed wasn't helping the issue. I then realised that I needed to change the min and max values to create a more even distribution.
Another option I was considering was to just have them on a grid, which although simple it still looked good. I also started to try experiment with using an AttributeVOP to ramp colour attributes to the points.
Module 11
With assessment 2, the timing of all the elements were faster than what I would have liked, however I only noticed once it was too late and I had already cached out all the simulations. For this assessment I decided to test out the timing earlier in the process, so I just did quick renders with low pixel samples to get an rough idea.
In this test I made the time 0.75, which felt slightly a bit fast.
The time scale for this was 0.35.
In this test I wanted to see what it would look like going from fast to a slow motion feel at 0.1.
Emission Attribute
During the lecture in week 11, we were shown how to create an AttributeVOP to ramp emission based off the curveu attribute. I decided to test these out on two of the anemone versions I liked the most.
For the first one, I added the glow to come from the ends, and added my ramped colour to my emission colour so that instead of it just being one colour, it could have a glow that flowed with the colours that it already had.
I added the two AttributeVOPs for the colour ramp and emission for this version that uses a cylinder for the base. I thought the result looked really great and having the emission come from the middle, got rid of the darkness problem I was initially having. I felt like this was the most interesting shape so I chose to work with this option.
Module 12
Rendering
I ended up placing an environment light in the scene that I thought make the animation look good.
This was my first proper render test which I really liked although I felt like I wanted to add something else to it to add to its playfulness.
To give a bit more interest and make the animation more playful, I added some time scale changes for the animation to speed up and slow down and I also adjusted the colour of the tips so that they turn a different colour with the time change. These changed made the anemone have a bit more of a dancelike motion.
This was my first test for the movement. After this, I added another moment for the time to change so there would be two sets of movements.
I really wanted the animation to loop, because I felt like it was something that I wanted to keep watching and it felt wrong to have it just stop. Originally the animation without the loop was 10 seconds, but I felt like that was too long before it looped and there was too much space in between the speed changes. I thought I'd shorten it to 7.5 seconds so that when I looped it, it would be a nice 15 seconds and then if it is shared on a platform like Instagram, video posts automatically loop, so it would flow well.
I was thinking of having some other camera angles, although I think it would've wrecked the look of the loop so I decided to have the anemone stay in the centre as a style choice.
In After Effects, I composited in a background colour. I chose this yellow because it blended in nicely with the yellow and orange emission colours in the middle of the anemone.
My brother Jackson Lister composed some music to go with the visual using a synthesiser.
Final Video
Reflection
I'm really happy with what I made. I think all the experimenting really helped to find something that looks really fun and playful. I learnt a lot about using vellum hair and how to use all the different settings to get different looks. The past assessments for this subject really helped me to understand the processes of creating procedural animation and made me plan for important things such as timing, file caching, rendering and materials, so this last assessment I was more on top of each of the steps.
