My concept for this project has been changing constantly since the beginning, with the only constant element being the lava lamp. I wanted to make a vector line drawing of a lava lamp I had on my desk at home, then tie effects on the lines into the audio. In the beginning, I had planned to project the composition onto the cabinets on the front of the room with an individual lava lamp on each cabinet door, but I decided to toss that idea since it would require a ton of overly-intricate taping and the projector tuned on the cabinets was too low a resolution, resulting in a lot of aliasing of the details (blurring the lines wasn't helping, the lines would disappear before they were effectively anti-aliased). I then saw the giant garage door next to the cabinets. Was told I couldn't tape the door, but I could still use it to display onto. In order to use the door but still use a technique similar to taping, I decided to base the piece on the lines that are formed by the grating on the door.
Process:
My process started with creating the vector image. I modeled a low-poly lava lamp in Maya, rendered it out as an .SVG file. and threw it into MadMapper. For the audio effects, I added an audio input control to the line red, green, and blue. It was very apparent that I needed to use the lavalamp-like Simplex_Gradient material in my composition, so I elected to use it for the background. I ended up making two planes of the same material in separate colors, and masked the layer on top so that every other grating on the garage door had the first background, with the second one showing through on the rest. For the actual lava lamp, I started by giving it the same material as the background, but decided that the sameness was boring, so I changed the material for the base and cap to Blobby to make some sort of variety of effect. I then had the problem of deciding what to put in the lava lamp, as well as what should be the audio input for the line effects. I decided to use the music video for "Aquarius" by The Fifth Dimension, which I felt paired well with the composition in general. To add a bit more to the look of the video, I added a Vertex Noise effect to the video as well as a low opacity overlay with the Simplex_Gradient material, hoping to give it a more liquid look.
Interpretation:
As for the intent behind this piece, I mostly sought to explore what creativity I could accomplish with MadMapper's material effects. The purest example of that exploration can be seen in my use of Vertex Noise on the music video quad and in my combining and masking of the two background effects. Overall, I'm very happy with how this project turned out! I feel that this composition displays a much greater harmony of color and theme than my first project.
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