Hicks ball //live generated motion graphics
This R&D was done using Notch motion graphics software, it is incorporating various workflows and tools that this software offers.
There are several things happening here in this R&D but I would like to focus on just a couple, first is the mesh in the center that I took from Cinema4D default library. I have stripped the human mesh of skin and saved it as .obj, brought it to Mixamo where i rigged the bones and found animations I wanted. (Mixamo is a part of adobe bundle and rigging there is easy as 123, takes less than a minute + they have a huge library of animations). So with that done mesh came straight to Notch, where I applied a material with colour, emissiveness and normal maps, I did not like how default mesh UVs looked so I added a mapping node to the mix, it has its own input slot in the material nodes bottom, there I set mapping node to spherical mode and played around with it till i got what I liked. With that done, I animated its offset with continuous mod.
Second thing I would like to draw your attention to is the procedural meshing, there are 2 extra meshes used in the scene from the very same Mixamo (in fact it is the same mesh with different animation) and they both are piped in to procedural 3d object nodes first input in the bottom, important thing to do with those is to mark ANIMATE SDF in the 3d object node, otherwise they will not animate. In the nodegraph above the 3d objects there is a 3d primitive node set to plane, that works as a smooth union surface for both animated 3d mesh zombies :), important setting on both of zombie procedural 3d object nodes - CSG mode, and that is set to smooth union, with that done they look like they are spawning from the 3d primitive plane/floor. One more gotcha lives in procedural meshing node itself, be sure to bump up the error tolerance and smoothing iterations, mine is set to 98. With that done things looks much smoother.
Bellow is a screenshot with majority of things we spoke of here
It is hard to keep things short and clear, so if non of this rant made sense to you, please take a look to the fast walk trough video, and if that does not make sense or is not very clear, shame on me! Just pop a comment or a message me and I will be glad to explain or help out.
^^^ Bill Hicks was a great contributor as a voice over for this R&D, have you already burned all your albums and all your cds? :)
Feel free to download and use this file for commercial or non commercial work
