#bstract

This weeks project, is to create abstract animations, which which we can use either characters, shapes, movement, forces, textures, etc. to create abstraction. 

Definition of abstract: Existing in thought or as an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence; relating to or denoting art that does not attempt to represent external reality, but rather seeks to achieve its effect using shapes, colours, and textures. 

Using this definition, I decided to create a few abstract animations. One inspiration point for me is my music. I create music as a hobby, and would love to incorporate it into my animation work. So that is what I wanted to seek out to create. But before I do so, I wanted to experiment with Cinema 4D and what it can do, as it has been a very long time since I have used it. 

My first idea was to create a little abstract cat character who could slide across onto walls and defy gravity. 

This idea however, quickly became boring. Very simple idea which would have not looked impressive at all. 

The next experiment involved the joint tools to create a character with an IK, that could completely bend and change its form. 

At the point of creating this character made from simple shapes, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. 

My next idea revolved around the cloner tool. This tool allowed me to clone objects around another object, to create an interesting shape. The randomiser allowed me to create very quick and effective variations. 

The first initial idea from this was to create cubes which change shapes as the sphere spins round, from getting longer, to thicker, to thinner, to smaller, etc. This however was too simple for me. I wanted more movement, not just an abstract shape made of shapes. 

I decided to change the cubes into spheres, and then also add a music effector and an attraction force to the spheres. I edited my song to the climax chorus point, which had a lot of loud and quiet points in order to show the changes of the balls drastically enough to please the viewer. I simply made the balls range from one size, to another, based on the volume and pitch of the sounds from the music. I liked this result. 

The next idea I had, was the create an abstract beach scene. The scene was to be created out of simple shapes and landscapes. Spheres for clouds, pyramids for leaves on a tree, cubes for the water waves, etc. 

Then I wanted to incorporate the idea of abstract physics, in which leaves don’t fall to the ground when they fall from a tree, they instead get carried by the wind, and when the wind stops blowing, they will come back to their original place as if nothing happened; water that is solid, which then becomes a gas in the middle of the animation, with no changes in the visual aspect of the material; and clouds which appear as though they are far away, and yet they really are not, and get moved by the wind as much as the leaves do. 

The first step to making this project was to make a working water animation from the cubes. I used a cloner and an animated randomiser with height and seed randomisation to give the water a look as though it is creating waves as the wind blows. 

The next step was to create the effect of leaves being taken off by wind. I tried different techniques to do this, such as attractors, wind effectors, and emmiters. I figured out that having the wind effector worked best, with the shapes being cloned around a sphere with an attraction force on them to make them come back into place when the wind stops. I also added another wind force to push the shapes upwards, as the shapes just fell down when giving them a collision body with dynamics on. 

At the end, I wanted to add in a beach ball, which was simply made from a sphere and a colour texture I quickly managed to create, which allowed he physics of the water to be shown. 

I got my sound effects for this animation from https://freesound.org/. I decided to use abstraction for the sound effects too. I used regular sounds for the atmosphere, such as the wind blowing, or the water waves - when it comes to the physical sounds, I used sounds you wouldn’t expect to hear from the objects that create them. The beach ball creates a smoosh sound it collides with the water. The leaves when they rustle in the wind while flying off, create a plastic bag crumpling sound. 

The next project I want to do is something more to do with music, or sound effects. I was inspired by an animation which used several rock formations which distorted according to the music that was playing. 

I began by creating a system in which allowed me to adjust the animation of a noise bump map on a sphere. The next step was to create a pleasing material. I wanted a single glowing diamond as the main focal point, and then several rock formations around this diamond which lightly react to the music. 

I tested out many different ways in which to create the diamond look, which also glows, and nothing seemed to look what I wanted it to look like. I also struggled with achieving the effect with the music beat that I wanted; the diamond was too spiky and too large at certain points. It also contracted to the centre too much. I didn’t want this to happen, and I could not figure out how to adjust the minimum value of this effect without destroying the rest of the look I already had in place. 

I decided to abandon this idea, and move onto another idea. 

This next idea was to do with a morphing sphere, which could transform itself from a static rock formation, into a dangerous, aggressive, spiky weapon, which never stayed static. Much like a high energy ball. 

I created this morphing blob of a ball, by using a MoExtrude onto the sphere, with two different random effectors at different ranges - one regular z-axis transformer, and one which is inverted - to achieve different visuals depending on how far the effector is from the initial sphere. I also used a spherify mesh effector at a large radius, in order to cause the ball to spherify when all the effectors come out of a certain radius. 

Next, I created the materials and the lighting effects for the animation that I have created, by keyframing the set of deformers (Which were globally centred using an XPresso tag with Global Matrix connected between all of them) around the sphere. 

I tried many different looks, from shiny objects, to ones which emit light from the very centre of the object (using ambient occlusion), to regular rock aesthetics. I went along with the blue rock sphere, as it gave the animation a unique look, and it also wasn’t extremely taxing on the computer to render the scene - with the ambient occlusion illumination on, the animation would have taken me 11 hours to render. 

I also decided to create randomly emitted spheres, which have an illumination material, and a Fresnel transparency, to give the spheres a unique, bubbly look. I really liked this effect. 

The last thing to do, was to get the animation rendered, and then add music/sound effects in After Effects. I wanted the glowing spheres in the background to be blurred and out of focus depending on their distance. I decided to try depth of field in the renderer. This proved to be slightly frustrating to work with, as sometimes it seemed like a guessing game as to how to modify the camera settings to suit the look I was looking for. Another problem was that it was very taxing on the render timing. 

An alternative to this, was a z-depth filter on the camera. I messed around with a random image to see how it worked, and what it looked like in After Effects when it was applied properly. I decided that the look it gave me, wasn’t what I was looking for. Some of the blurriness looked, more like a glow, rather than a blur. I didn’t like this, and decided to omit the depth of field completely, and just render the animation as it was. 

The last part of the problem that I came across, was finding a sound or music track that fit the animation. I wasn’t sure what I wanted at first, but searching through an entire library of sounds on https://freesound.org/ I came across a very deep, bass, space sound - much like something you’d hear in Transformers. I really liked this, and looking a bit more into bass electronic sounds, I came across a sound that fit perfectly with the animation. 

Most of the sound effect actually fit like a puzzle piece when placed into After Effects with the animation. There was a few tweaks here and there, such as extending and compressing some of the transition times between swooshes to make them fit much more naturally, as well as go along with the camera and sphere deformations that are seen. 

I came across an effector on Adobe After Effects, called CC Lens, which spherified the entire video, making it look like a fish-eye lens. This turned out to be very unique and extremely interesting to look at, so I decided to keep this as a separate rendered version of this piece.