Ankitha Vasudev-Looking Outwards-05

Growth: Mysterious Gallery (1983) is a five-minute long animation sequence that was created by Yoichiro Kawaguchi – an artist who became popular for his unique style of art using computer graphics.

In this project, Kawaguchi created a self-organizing, procedural, modelling algorithm that could make many complex life forms. The inspiration for this project was natural and organic objects that exhibit repetitive patterns, such as shells, claws and spiraling plants. Kawaguchi wanted to create an algorithm to recreate these forms artistically. 

I admire this artist and project because of how realistic it’s 3D animation is. Additionally, this technique was one of the first of its kind. Kawaguchi used two process related to image rendering to create this animation: ray tracing and metaballs. Ray tracing defined the color to be rendered in order to add depth to the 3D image. Metaballs were first used by Kawaguchi to represent organic looking, n-dimensional objects. 

After this project, Kawaguchi continued to produce animated short films using 3D computer graphics. Some of his other notable works include Embryo(1988), Gigalopolis(1995) and Cytolon(2002).