#optic bands

[syriixprocess]

Animation Audio : Optic Bands / Quartz Pool / Cube Tear

Due to the nature of each of the clips they needed the audio for each one created in a slightly different way.

This first image is a screenshot from Optic Bands Ableton session, the sound for this loop was mostly ambience without any real synchronous point other than the faint buzz/hum in the background that I automated in whenever the bands intersect.

The 2nd is the audio for Quartz Pool, I made the audio last about 8 loops of the scene. I had a background sound of a flowing cave stream and some glass being dragged across an object to get that clink you would hear from a shard of glass, similar to how the light cracks and reflect in the QP loop.

The last picture is the audio for Cube Tear. I made audio for the loop using an audio recording of icy leaves falling to the ground. The other foley in the audio is the noise of paper turning, a handful of leaves being gathered and dropped and the movement of the cube is accompanied by the sound of a curling stone sliding past a microphone.

Pretty much all of my samples were gathered using ' BBC Sound Effects' & 'SoundSnap'

I bounced the audio for each of these and then made the extended visual loops with audio (for release on youtube) inside of premiere pro.

[syriixprocess]

Optic Bands [9]

This is the cube I added to my scene, its very simple. I added the cube, with a basic Principled BSDF (an extensive shader node thats used for a lot of different types of material) with the roughness all the way down and metallic at 100%. This made the cube mostly reflect the dark world around it but also lets some of the Emission lights scatter off the faces pointing towards the camera.

I put the cube just above the glass plane and tried to place it centrally to any interesting part of the loop. The cube rotates 360 degrees in the entire length of the scene + 1 frame - only allowing the cube to rotate 359 degrees during the scene is key to making it loop as the 360th degrees will be the first frame of the next loop.

[syriixprocess]

Optic Bands [8]

This is how I set up the depth of field on the camera, I could fiddle with digital camera settings for a while but I opted for an easier option.

On the right side of the screen you can see my camera settings, the depth of field is turned on and I used the 'Focus On Object' and bound it to an empty axis object ("Focus Empty") - you can faintly see the empty's position (highlighted in yellow) within the view-finder.

[syriixprocess]

Optic Bands [7]

This is the camera setup shot here

[syriixprocess]

Optic Bands [6]

This is where my camera is placed in my scene, to find it I played the animation for a while and just looked for an area that had some interesting shapes morphing and featured the widest range of colours.

As the empty was animated via its x-axis rotation I found the most movement in the material towards the edges of the plane, positions close to the centre or on the x-axis line didn't change much.

[syriixprocess]

Optic Bands [5]

The panel on the left is the shader nodes for the glass.

The 4 nodes on the left are all to create this dirty look on the glass, the colour ramp at the end allows me to tune how much of the 'muck' ends up on the glass. I think this adds some nice detail and a bit of glow.

[syriixprocess]

Optic Bands [4]

I added a glass plane the same size as the material plane above it to give the emission light some where to pool together and bloom. This gives is a bit more of an overall glow.

[syriixprocess]

Optic Bands [3]

The first image is a close up of the material with the array modifiers turned off. Array adds multiple instances of the object (or a material in this case) in the scene stacked on or adjacent to each other.

The second image shows the array modifier turned on, I bound the offset of the array to an 'Empty Object' which allows me to use the 3D coordinate position of an object to control the parameters of another object or modifier.

In this case the 'empty' is just down and to the side of the centre scene, this skews the array out in a similar fashion adding this cool layered and 3-dimensional effect.