Archive for the ‘ MDDN 311 - Expanded Media ’ Category
Flight of the Butterfly Documentation
Flight of the Butterfly is a live, interactive audio-visual performance by digital media designer Tim Turnidge. Created in Blender and After Effects, composed in Quartz composer and triggered through VDMX, the piece features a robot engaged in a conflict with an enemy army. The performance is combined with a music track titled “Flight of the Butterfly” by Subatomic Glue.
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Whew! With beta presentations for 412 and all the stress of getting this performance ready to go I have kinda neglected this blog for a while so it’s time for a bit update.
Much has changed since last post, I have now got all the scenes required for the performance ready to go. They’re a mixture of Quartz Composer patches and straight movies that are triggered through VDMX using a midi controller (The M-Audio Trigger Finger to be precise).
All up theres about a dozen scenes, some with more than 1 sub-scenes or angles in them. Almost all of the scenes have audio-reactive elements in them which really enhances the link between the visuals and the music and means that I don’t have to baby-sit every scene.
The enemy scenes all feature a blue colour scheme and movement from right to left to contrast with the red of the robot and his left to right movements. This dynamic allows me to mix the two together to show conflict.
I had to remove some of the more graphically intensive generative elements from a couple of my scenes because I was getting performance issues while performing, but I have tried to make up for it with less intensive graphic elements, i.e, simple bars as opposed to 3D bars and pulsing colours as opposed to pulsing shapes. Overall I don’t think this has impacted on the visual effect of the performance too much, and I’m probably the only one who will notice that they are missing.
There is also a loose story to the whole performance, it’s a little bit sketchy but I feel it’s adequate for what is essentially a music video.
Goodness gracious, great balls of plasma!
I’ve put together some renders and a quartz patch that will form the scene after the robot fires his gun. It features a ball of plasma created in Quartz and After Effects hurtling down a street created in Blender. At the moment the ball is controlled by the mouse but will be converted to run off a midi controller through VDMX. The red star shape is reactive to the music and is a modified version of the Quartz patch I used in Project 1.
Visually it could do with a couple of tweaks and some added bling but it’s pretty much all there.
More shooting animations.
I’ve been working on creating different angles for the charging up sequence, I’ve got 4 so far which should be adequate. They all loop and have the glowing plasma ball attached (which has had a bit of bling added). (edit: I have since fixed the position of the lens flare in chargeloop4.mov!)
I’ve decided on the audio track I’m going to use, it’s a track called Dance of the Butterfly by Subatomic Glue, the same artists I used for project 1.
I have begun mapping out the different scenes so that I have a better overview of how the timing is going to work.
Next up will be creating a couple of scenes for the enemies that the robot blasts!
Pew pew pew
Here’s the animation of the robot shooting his gun. There is enough footage in the middle to loop so he can charge up his gun for as long as needed then fire only when I trigger it. I might add some different angles to spice things up a bit too. Then I need to decide what it is exactly that it fires; lasers? bullets? rockets?
1st scene pretty much done.
Well I’ve completed one of many scenes for the performance, the side on walking scene.
This scene shows the robot walking along a road through the city and is intended as a bit of a filler. The “buildings” at the front of the scene are reactive to music and pulse according to the intensity of the music. This is intended to help tie the action on screen with the music, because the robot’s walkcycle will not be in synch with the music beats.
The buildings in the background are just parallaxed sprites with a blur on them, these are intended to add visual variety and add depth to the scene.
I’m currently working on creating the scene where the robot fires his gun – this needs to be awesome because it will be the start of the climax of the piece.
Robot treats!
I have been putting finishing touches on the robot, I could spend weeks adding bits and bobs but I’ve decided that I’ve spent enough time on him already and it’s time to start working on the animations.
As you can see, he’s gained a bit more armour on his legs and torso as well as cables on his back and gun. I think that these really add to the look of the robot and help to fill him out visually. The wires have the added benefit of being a bit elastic which contrasts the rigidness (rigidity?) of the rest of him. I added a light in his torso which makes for some nice moving shadows when he is animated.
Next up I moved on to creating a walk cycle. I had done a walk cycle before which meant that I was able to get something quite decent fairly quickly. I tried to focus on adding a sense of weight to him, I might also experiment with shaking the camera when he steps to make him seem even more immense.
Since the walkcycle animations are less than a second, they arent viewable on Youtube, so you can download them here (front view) and here (back view).
I am currently hunting around for some open source music to base my performance around. So far opsound seems to be my best bet.
Final post before presentation
Have added a little bit of armour bling to the robot in the form of shoulder and knee pads. It goes a little way to filling out the robot’s skeletal look but I might need to add a little bit more.
I’ve also got a powerpoint ready to go for presentation.
Lasers pew pew pew!
I’ve been working on another scene for the presentation where the robot shoots his gun. It’s made in After Effects and is essentially just some blurry shapes and some colour effects.
It’s not as awesome as I had hoped but I’ll keep working on it.
More robot progress
Development of the robot progressed pretty quickly once I got into it and after about a day or two I had the robot pretty much fully meshed and rigged.
I tried to stay true to my original idea of having as many interesting joints as possible so that when he gets fully animated he appears as dynamic as possible. He does have quite a skeletal form which I’m not sure if I am quite happy with, I am considering bolting on some armour plates on areas like his shoulders and upper arms and legs to fill him out a bit, but that will probably be for project 3.
After getting the mesh completed I started to add some colour for variety. I also mocked up a bit of an environment to add a sense of scale (those cubes in the background are intended to represent buildings).
Next I moved on to making some of the other scenes for the performance. I wanted to have a scene where the audience sees the scene from the robot’s point of view, complete with a snazzy GUI. So I mocked something up in Photoshop.
The central reticule would be set up in Quartz to follow the mouse pointer so that during the performance I could move it around. The other elements would be animated to add movement to the scene.
And then I made it in Quartz to test it out.
I’m working on polishing up things and creating a presentation for hand-in tomorrow.
TimDoesBlogs
Recent entry
- 2009-10-26
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- 2009-10-25
- Flight of the Butterfly Documentation
- 2009-10-21
- Development
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- 2009-10-15
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