X-Particles and Arnold

Sometimes you need to get back to basics.  I think I’m done with code art and algorithms.  I’ve been getting to grips with X-Particles and the Arnold renderer in C4D, and I made these this morning without breaking a sweat and getting dizzy and light headed at the amount of fun I was having.  The way it should be.  I spent too much time in the wilderness of experimentation.  But in the time I’ve been away – 3D software has become what I’ve always wanted it to be.

X-Particles is deeply complex and infinite in creative possibilities, and plugs seamlessly into XPresso.  Arnold offers instant interactive rendering feedback, at amazing speeds, has a powerful shader network based on XPresso, not to mention the best rendering, lighting and material system I’ve ever seen anywhere.  I’m done with code.

 

Another World 360

Here’s the link to my Facebook post on this..

 

Derezzed

Continuing on with my work based around shaders and panoramic projection (read the making of ‘Temples’ ).  In this this video, rather than animate the camera / spherical projection manually in After Effects, I made the camera purely random and generative, by adding noise() expressions to latitude, longitude, rotation and zoom.

Here’s a still of a panoramic frame..

 

also, here’s a final frame from the video – it’s more to show the detail unfortunately lost in Vimeo’s compression.  There’s a lot of fine, fast moving detail which is sacrificed.

Temples

Procedurally generated ancient ruins, in a single 360 panoramic tracking shot. Rendered entirely in a shader on a graphics card GPU.

I accidentally discovered a terrain generation algorithm (using ray marching) which seemed to closely resemble architectural structures in disrepair. They could easily pass for Greek, Roman, Hindu or Egyptian. You can see columns, pillars, archways and decorative carvings… generated purely from a few lines of code and math.

The animation was created using a single tracking shot, rendered in 4K equirectangular format. This allowed me to direct the camera in post production using stereographic projection – allowing fisheye and ‘little planet’ views, as well as conventional looking camera views.

Here’s one of the 4k equirectangular frames – you can load this into any 360 panoramic viewing software.

Software / resources:

Processing (proessing.org) & GLSL shaders (inspiration & hacked code from http://www.shadertoy.com, and Little Planets plugin for After Effects (by subblue).

Music – Philip Glass – String Quartet No. 3 “Mishima” , VI. Performed by the Carducci Quartet.

360 Fractal / Landscape art

Been getting further into creating VR worlds using GLSL shaders, fractal / ray marching, using Processing.  I took the rendered outputs and used 360 viewing software to find some interesting stand alone compositions.

Here’s how some of the initial 360 / 180 fov scenes look..

 

and here’s how they look when playing around with a 360 panoramic viewer..