Full Day Simulation¶
Written by Catalina Vajiac.
This show was designed in February 2022, and demonstrates a peaceful, calming simulation of the stages of a full day (sunrise, daytime, sunset, nighttime).
Contents
Creative Approach¶
The general idea for this show was to create a peaceful, calming and meditative design. I particularly wanted to include a sunset, since I’ve always loved looking at them. To give the sunset more context and to make it loop smoothly, I decided to create a full day simulation with four phases: sunrise, daytime, sunset, and nighttime.
I knew I wanted the following qualities in my design:
Emulate a peaceful environment, i.e. the emotions one feels when staring at a sunset, looking at clouds, etc
Each phase of the day should take up the same amount of time, for visual interest.
Gradual transitions: each phase should flow gradually into the next.
On-Site Documentation¶
This documentation video shows the version of the piece created with Pharos Designer.
Methodology¶
I started by sketching every effect within each phase on pen and paper. I noted what colors I’d want to use and which effects I’d like to simulate for each phase. For the sunrise / sunset phases, I knew I wanted a gradual hue shift displaying warm reds, oranges, and yellows. For the daytime phase, I wanted a sky blue background with white clouds lazily drifting across. For nighttime, I wanted to capture the darkness of the sky with twinkling stars.
I started with Pharos Designer 2, which could easily support all of the effects I’d sketched. I found that the built-in Pharos effects gave me most of the functionality I’d imagined. I started by directly implementing the effects I had sketched. I looked at pictures of sunrises and sunsets to pick the red, orange, and yellow colors, then tweaked them by eye. For daytime and nighttime, I hand picked the colors. I then iteratively tweaked the duration of the effects and transitions until I was happy with what the simulation showed.
Once actually deploying my show on the bridge, I made a few additional tweaks. For example, I originally was worried the show would be too slow, so I made each phase pretty short (45 seconds each). Once I saw it deployed on the bridge, I realized longer time frames for each phase made more sense.
The Pharos project file for this version can be downloaded as
Full-Day-Simulation.pd2.
Python Implementation¶
As an exercise, I later designed a custom python script that outputs a video (.avi) file, which can be imported into a Pharos timeline, and reimplemented this show as part of my testing of the script. This also allowed me to add one feature that I wanted as part of my design, but wasn’t easy to implement in Pharos – having the clouds (implemented as a wave effect in Pharos) in the daytime simulation take up only the top half of the bridge, to emulate clouds high in the sky. I started by re-implementing all the effects that I used in Pharos, and iteratively added a few more, including some that are beyond the scope of this case study.
With the exception of the clouds, the end product for the full day simulation ended up being almost identical to the Pharos implementation. It’s much more natural to create more diverse effects and composite them together using a custom implementation vs Pharos, where the most natural way of implementing a show is to stitch pre-defined effects together. While Pharos alone would have been sufficient for this project, I would consider a custom implementation for any more complex shows.
The rendered video file from the custom Python implementation is a lossless “PNG in AVI” format (228x8 pixels, 30 fps) which can play in VLC: Full-Day-Simulation.avi.
Following is a transcoded MPEG-4 version which can play in a web browser for preview.
Palette Reference Images¶
I started picking my colors for the sunrise / sunset phases using the following images, as well as a color palette I found online:
