Hannah Cai—Looking Outwards—05

This music video for Damon Albarn’s (you might know him from the Gorillaz) song “Everyday Robots” is actually a sculpture video. I don’t know the actual software being used for it, but I really love the way the music and the video go together, even through some unexpected moments. Focusing on the 3D graphics portion of this prompt though, it’s really amazing how detailed the skull is, as well as how realistic you can get with the final sculpture, including lighting effects. In theory, it makes sense for 3D graphics to be easy to compute—instead of just having x and y, there’s just another axis added on. But I never understood textures, lighting, and basically everything else that make 3D graphics look realistic. If I had to guess how those things were programmed, I’d guess that textures might be able to be implemented with for loops and randomization, and lighting could be some kind of vector with a gradient, but I really don’t know. I know there are lighting and texture functions in p5 as well; now that my curiosity has been piqued, I might do some research into how and why those functions work.