Assembly: Life in Macrospace
Done for Gecko Animation Ltd, which I am now a part of!
A short experimental piece featuring a blend of Macro Photography and CG Animation. It started with an idea from David Parvin, of Two Rivers Partnership, involving abstract forms and macro photography. With the footage shot, Jonathan Lax and myself worked on constructing a narrative from the forms we saw by combining CG elements with the original footage.
The CG elements were all done in blender (though some of the fluid sim stuff was done with RealFlow) and rendered in BI. Lots of animated node materials for the shifting surfaces and displacements.
Credits:
Director of Photography – David Parvin
Live Action Shoot – David Parvin, Jonathan Lax, Tobin Brett
CG Animation and Effects – Ben Simonds, Jonathan Lax
Editing – Jonathan Lax
Music and Sound FX – Alistair Lax
Creating Concepts with Alchemy, GIMP, and Blender
I’ve been playing around with Alchemy for a while now, and it’s a suberbly fun little program for coming up with visual ideas. For those of you who don’t know of it, its a 2D drawing application with all sorts of chaotic tools for creating shapes and patterns, that you can then start picking out shapes to develop ideas from. With the recent addition of .xcf import to blender, allowing you to import layered xcf files and automatically set them up for rendering, I started getting some ideas about combining alchemy and blender via GIMP. Here’s a little video showing the process I used to create the images above, plus a hint at how I applied the same method in 3D to create an animated abstract 3D character.
Here are a couple of other results (click the second for an animated walkcycle):
Anyway, let me know if you think of anything cool using this technique.
