The interactive game I admire most about is the dark soul series of game, not only for their highly criticized high level of difficulty, but also for the art of 3D medieval dark fantasy in it. With its hardcore difficulty, it points to the future of game as a form sport instead of just a form entertainment. Hidetaka Miyazaki spend over 5 years to create this fantastic game. Hidetaka Miyazaki ‘s Dark Souls creation was inspired by real world architecture such as Milan Cathedral and Château de Chambord, and his previous creation “Demon’s Soul”. To my knowledge the game was sold by the company FormSoftware, and I assume it was developed with commercial software.
Links of Dark Soul III and Dark Soul I-III(Japanese) by Hidetaka Miyazaki: https://store.steampowered.com/app/374320/DARK_SOULS_III/ https://www.darksouls.jp/
A project that inspired me a lot is Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studio’s collaboration movie “Up”. Released in 2009, the movie took the team 5 years to create. Besides the touching plot line of the movie, I also admire the movie’s stunning animation, including the thousands of balloons, the character’s realistic and detailed looks, and the beautifully illustrated landscape views. To animate the movie, the studio uses their unique software “Presto”. It is developed and used in-house by Pixar Animation Studios in the animation of its features and short films. Presto is not available for sale and is only used by Pixar. According to the movie director Pete Docter, the movie’s animation style took inspiration from “Toy Story”. New programs were made to simulate the cloth and other textures. These new designs would bring animation to new levels in the future.
Soungwen Chung is a multidisciplinary artist and in the artwork Gestures of Becoming-With, she explored a future with the communication between humans and machines. This project is super interesting for me because the author was brave enough to use groundbreaking technologies in a different field such as art. She used a robot hand to create the artwork which took her about 3 months. The artwork was created during the COVID-19 quarantine lockdown. The robot imitated her brush/marker strokes while she was painting with her hand, which interests me the most. To my knowledge, the author did not develop any custom software. Instead, she used some commercial software that was available in the market.
Reference Chung, Soungwen. Gestures of Becoming-With. 2021, Brooklyn.
I continue to be inspired by the VFX in Stranger Things, which is done by Rodeo FX using (from what I could discern online) Maya for modeling and Arnold Core for rendering. The most recent season, according to VFX supervisor Julien Hery, was the product of about two years of work.
The Stranger Things VFX inspires me for a couple of reasons. For one, the monster design is spectacular; it enhances the storytelling significantly. Secondly, Stranger Things works to bridge the gap between practical and computer-generated effects, and they do a fantastic job of it. They use VFX in such an artful and compelling way to make creatures that are completely fictitious, but move in their environment in a very convincing way, enhancing the immersion and worldbuilding.
You can see one of their completely CG monsters in this scene:
The continued improvement of visual effects such as these will broaden the horizons of future filmmakers and storytellers, allowing them to elegantly depict what before could only be imagined.
Turning Red, 2022, Domee Shi While much of what I will talk about in this blog post is applicable to large scale 3D animation projects as a whole, for this post, I will focus on “Turning Red”, a film recently released by Pixar. I think that one of the most inspirational (and relatable) facets of 3D animation is the time it takes to produce- of course earlier steps in the creative process in itself are time consuming, but even aspects of the pipeline that one might not even consider, like rendering, are extremely tedious. In animation, the rule of thumb is that 24 frames are shown per second of film, and at studios like Disney and Pixar, due to the amount of detail packed into each frame, rendering one frame is a process that takes about 24 hours. As a result, it is no surprise that Turning Red took four years to complete (a relatively quick turnaround for Pixar). While Autodesk Maya is the 3D animation software most commonly used for feature length films and games, Pixar uses its own software (what is, essentially, the in-studio version of Maya), called Presto. That being said, of course, through the course of production, in order to better capture life, usually animators will homebrew their own scripts, whether it is to better capture the bounce of curly hair (as with Brave), or further nail down the way water moves (as with Moana). This pattern is really interesting, as each film that gets released by major studios ends up not only being a (usually) well thought out story, but also, a display of new 3D animation technologies that push the medium forward. Recently, I have noticed that 3D animation is becoming more and more stylized (a trend I hope to see continue!), and I’m excited to see the new technologies that emerge with said stylization.
A fully rendered, edited, etc. still from Turning Red, 2022
PANDEMIC (2020-2022) is an in-progress 1st-person 3D simulation game where the player acts as a virus, experiencing an abstract version of the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. An immersive art piece designed to commentate on the xenophobia and political turmoil brought forth by the pandemic, the game grows in intensity as the player progresses through the reality imagined by Chanhee Choi, a multidisciplinary interactive artist and Ph.D. candidate in the UW Digital Arts and Experimental Media department. PANDEMIC has been under development since 2020, and is set to release this year. The inspiration for the game stemmed from Choi’s personal experience with being the victim of an anti-Asian hate crime during the outbreak.
To create this unreal experience and environment, Choi used custom scripts to enable player control, created a multitude of 3D models as objects with unique in-game behavior, and programmed interactions with the player-controlled virus (I speculate that Unreal Engine was used to create PANDEMIC). She was possibly inspired by other immersive art games with the purpose of creating social commentary and raising awareness for real world problems that need mainstream discussion and attention.
Struggling Asteroids / Stars Map by Sabina Studio / Art and Technology
video demo of Sabina Studio’s audio-reactive Max patch
Struggling Asteroids is an audio-reactive video created by Sabina Studio / Art and Technology. She created the script “Stars Map” in Max Msp Jitter.
I love this project because it brings music to life in the form of a beautiful morphing fabric-like form. This takes not only computational skill but also a clear artistic vision. The resulting graphics are pulsing and complex, yet imply a three-dimensional structure by the way the lines appear to stack.
By modifying some parameters in her script, the artist has created both far-away and close-up views of these 3D modules. Close up, they look like sticks and nodes (or like the toothpick and marshmallow models that kids make). From far away, they resemble something like a topographic model or mapping of constellations.
A programmed artistic project that I find fascinating is Den.make, an independent project created by a software engineer in New York City. This engineer/artist uses creative coding and algorithmic art to make moving images that can resemble 3d meshes of geodes to 2-dimensional cells moving within a cramped space. When I first discovered this artist on instagram, I was enthralled by a video of a robot arm drawing in the contours of a complex mountainous valley. In other words, this initial interest came from my love of robots in science fiction creating pen and ink lineart, another thing I love. Now, as I’ve explored more of his work, what moves me more is the biophilic effect that this animated coded art has, particularly the cell-like animations. These images reflect on the nature of coding as the building blocks of technological life, just like the DNA in every functioning organism in nature. This art demonstrates how coding can mimic microorganisms, and perhaps create them in the future.
Since the last decade, a national movement to rebuild the long lost McKim, Meade & White Pennsylvania Station has made me come to admire New York’s old 20th Century architecture.
This movement was founded by Richard Cameron and James Grimes back in the 2010’s. Their vision of improving New York’s current, run-down Penn Station was to rebuild the original station, which had opened in 1910 was demolished in 1963 to make way for Madison Square Garden.
Cameron and Grimes’s extensive blueprints are pretty much the same as the original ones from the 1900s, but they are still bringing a touch of the 21st Century into their designs. These modern enhancements include sustainable energy, solar panels, LED Lighting, and even a rooftop garden!
Their work was fully enhanced through the use of standard CAD software, which allowed them to visualize the original designs with their modern design features.
Cameron and Grimes are trying to grab the public’s support for this massive $2.5 billion dollar project. I definitely support this movement, as it focuses on preserving the cultural importance of 20th Century architecture, while enhancing “the works” with 21st century technology.
The Impact of “Can’t Help Myself” by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu
“Can’t Help Myself” is the embodiment of trying to dig yourself out of a hole. I’ve never seen another piece that visually describes what can usually not be put into words. The project is unique in its unapologetic devastation. I think the piece is really relevant in this current social climate, where mental health issues are most concerning in our generation. Essentially, the robot repeatedly attempts to scrape up red fluid. It turns and the red splatters more, when it looks back, the red has just spread back to its original mess. The machine is incapable of stopping, of learning. It quite literally cannot help itself. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu were commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in 2016. As the years have passed, the robot has rusted and slowed, creating a dismal scene. The artists created the code themselves and gave the robot 32 series of movements like “bow and shake” or “scratch an itch”. This robot’s life long mission will lead to nowhere and be the death of it. The piece shines a light on issues that will continue to ravage the world, almost to no end. Looking at the political world, it is interesting to think about the impact of change and big concepts like the meaning of life and so on. The video can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS4Bpr2BgnE&ab_channel=VernissageTV.
Work Cited
Hampsink, Iris Olde. “Can’t Help Myself – How a Relatable Robot Offers a Critical Reflection on Modern Society.” Diggit Magazine, 28 Feb. 2022, https://www.diggitmagazine.com/papers/can-t-help-myself-how-relatable-robot-offers-critical-reflection-modern-society.
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