Discoveries
By Glypse and HYDESKY
Together, we created this ethereal animation in a few days, purely as a practice of sound design for HYDESKY and of cinematography for Glypse.
« This animation was heavily inspired by Canadian artist Aeforia, especially their artworks “Nublado” and “Instinct”. I had a lot of fun using Human Generator 3D's add-on, Quixel Megascans' assets and playing with the geometry nodes system of Blender as well as their EEVEE render engine. We can also see notable influence from Tonan Ahn. » — Glypse
« Synths have been made with granular synthesis by starting from a simple guitar sample. This is a technique that I find particularly interesting when making ambience or huge background pads.
Other SFX have been crafted by starting from samples I found on YouTube, I cut and rearranged multiple parts and heavily processed them. This was something completely new for me, and I’m glad to say I learned some new cool tricks regarding sound design. I would like to thank Glypse for this opportunity. » — HYDESKY
« This animation was heavily inspired by Canadian artist Aeforia, especially their artworks “Nublado” and “Instinct”. I had a lot of fun using Human Generator 3D's add-on, Quixel Megascans' assets and playing with the geometry nodes system of Blender as well as their EEVEE render engine. We can also see notable influence from Tonan Ahn. » — Glypse
« Synths have been made with granular synthesis by starting from a simple guitar sample. This is a technique that I find particularly interesting when making ambience or huge background pads.
Other SFX have been crafted by starting from samples I found on YouTube, I cut and rearranged multiple parts and heavily processed them. This was something completely new for me, and I’m glad to say I learned some new cool tricks regarding sound design. I would like to thank Glypse for this opportunity. » — HYDESKY
High-quality still frame
Visuals creation process
Step 1: getting the rigged basemesh
Fortunately, this was made very easy thanks to Human Generator 3D's addon. The only manual steps I had to do were to delete the face components (eyes and eyesockets, mouth, nose) and sculpt the face back into a smooth shape, with enough typology to displace it later.
Step 2: creating a displacement vertex group
Manually painted over the desired area in a custom vertex group.
Step 3: displacing in geometry nodes
I used this setup to get the face to look like "crystals", in a way.
Note that the two Voronoi textures are actually the same, but while one is used to displace the face, the other will be used in shading to give the edges of the "crystals" a golden material.
Note that the two Voronoi textures are actually the same, but while one is used to displace the face, the other will be used in shading to give the edges of the "crystals" a golden material.
Step 4: animating the model
Step 5: shading
The tricky part here is to get the Voronoi edges to be transferred as a mask. Hence why the Attributes nodes, where the inputs are the outputs of the geometry nodes modifier. The marble and gold materials come from Jeshua's Material Pack Vol.1 (originally made to work in cycles but those two materials work fine in EEVEE).
Step 5: layout and composition
I tried to have a lively composition, playing with depth of field and background elements.
Step 6: creating a looping displacement for the plants waving
The trick is to use a combination of multiple textures evolving at the same speed, and fading from one to another as the animation progresses.
The first texture starts at a W value of 0 and end at 200, all that while fading from this first texture to the second, which goes from W -200 to 0. The start and end of the animation being both at the same W value and the textures evolving at the same speed, this creates a seamless loop. (the same setup is used for the X and Y displacement values, just with shifted W values).
The first texture starts at a W value of 0 and end at 200, all that while fading from this first texture to the second, which goes from W -200 to 0. The start and end of the animation being both at the same W value and the textures evolving at the same speed, this creates a seamless loop. (the same setup is used for the X and Y displacement values, just with shifted W values).
Note: the same principle is used to make the rocks move, but with a noise modifier in the graph editor instead of MixRGB nodes in geometry nodes. Looking back at it, it would have been a lot easier to make the rocks move via geometry nodes too.
Step 6: compositing
Simply added a bit of chromatic aberration via the Lens Distortion node, and added a vignette.
