Topic: blender wip psy ambient trance music video project

[ratty redemption]

i checked with kat if i could post this new topic in this part of his forum, as it's not currently for a video game, although it uses similar mesh modeling, uv unwrapping, rigging and bone animating tech. 

www.youtube.com/user/rattyredemption

all of my uploads to yt so far have been short low res test renders. they should give an indication of the art style.

some of the earlier videos show my first attempts at animating the alien jellyfish. i need to practice more on those as the animations aren't fluid enough for my liking. i am pleased with the background animations though.

eventually i would like to have the finished animations as interactive dream sequences in the video game project i'm also concept designing. if i work more on that project in the future, i'll also cover the wip here on katsbits and possibly over at blender artists forums.

currently the visuals for the music video project have all been done in blender 2.6x using procedural generated 2d textures, which are key framed with blender's graph and node editors.

as far as i know shader node materials are not currently supported by most game engines, if any, although maybe i could use pre-rendered 2d animated textures if eventually needed for the game project.

most of the background materials and meshes, may look very similar to each other, apart from color palettes, but they do have subtle changes in the movement of the materials and or camera and mesh deformations.

the youtube versions archive the development over several months, as i improve my use of the tools and refine the vision i have for this project.

the foreground will mainly be the alien jellyfish i first started covering in this topic:

http://www.katsbits.com/smforum/index.php?topic=6.msg2243#msg2243

the first image below is one of the node material setups.

the next two images show one of the background meshes at different times during the animation, as well as it's deformation rig and camera. the node material is different for the last image.

[kat]

Depending on the game engine you'd be using you probably need to break this down into two parts, 1) an animated mesh and 2) a colour transforming material/shader. You'd definitely need to do some research into the latter.

[ratty redemption]

thanks kat, and as the background meshes are deformed by only a few bones, i imagine they should export quite easily into a game engine? i'll do more research into reproducing the material shader effects when i have enough time.

[ratty redemption]

below is a couple of images of my latest background deformation and camera key framing.

they might not look much technically, but in my opinion, one of the most interesting effects comes from how they combine with the node materials to produce some beautiful distortions, which in turn influence the movement of color, as it flows across the video frames.

of course a lot of this is subjective and i accept not everyone will appreciate this style of art, let alone choose to watch it for any extended period of time.

also please take into consideration that the short test renders i upload to youtube are all designed to loop, which they do if they are downloaded and played back in a media player that supports looping. the overall hypnotic effect is considerably more powerful than watching a single video clip just once through.

the final music videos will be comprised of several looping sections that are faded or morphed into each other over time.

when it's working, blender is an excellent tool for getting my surreal concept ideas into something a little more tangible.

technically though, when it comes to animating my jellyfish foreground, i'm still a newbie so will welcome any constructive advise on improving my traditional animation skills. more on that when i'm next working on the foreground.

[kat]

Are you going to sync these to the musics BPM (Beats Per Minute), or just leave it as relatively random shape/form/colour turbulances?

[ratty redemption]

good question, and i've thought about syncing some of the visuals to the specific music tracks i intend to use, but probably will leave most of them unsynced, partly for technical reasons, but also i would like my artwork to work with a cross section of music genres and individual tracks, and if it's obviously synced to some music that might detract it working with others.

even with these short clips, when viewed looping, they do appear to automatically sync to some degree with most music i've tested them with.

[ratty redemption]

here's some direct links a few of my youtube videos.

[kat]

How are you setting the effects oscillation (the speed and duration of the blending, swirling and so on)? If it's a property setting it should be relatively straightforward to change the Frames per second to something that corresponds to BMP? 120BPM = 2 beats/second, which is what? 12 frames per/between individual beats (at 24FPS)? That way even if you have ambient music (without obvious beat markers), so long as the tune conforms to BPM you should be able to sync reasonably well.

[ratty redemption]

thanks kat and i'm mainly key framing the background mesh deformation and node materials using the graph editor. i think i understand what your suggesting and it does sound very cool. do you have any more info or links i could learn more about this?

[ratty redemption]

[ratty redemption]

a test showing compositing of one of my pre-rendered psy cloud backgrounds run though a displace node, and then mixed with my pre-rendered high frequency pattern.

this node setup should allow me to use the same high frequency layer on any of my existing backgrounds which use the same mesh deformation and camera angles.

although as this is abstract work, it might be possible to get away with them not using the same tracking.



here is a couple of direct links to the youtube uploads of these tests.

[ratty redemption]

a test render without the medium frequency rotating layer, and with more variation in scaling.



further testing of the displacement nodes, and mixing of my high frequency layer with my uv test pattern.



a test render with the high frequency layer blended more subtly with the psy clouds than some of the previous versions.

[ratty redemption]

mostly the same as the previous test but with a different colored psy cloud layer. the high frequency is blended using an overlay mixer node so derives some of it's color from the background.

[kat]

Noise level of the texture is a little higher than I'd use myself but overall you'd be hard pushed to know that was being done in Blender 

[ratty redemption]

do you mean the relatively small size of the gaps between the high frequency pattern? or the overall amount of movement that layer creates? and he he, thanks kat.

ot: when you have time could you reply to my last email, no rush though.