Jake Williams: Context Mapping

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg0FMb0TmX4

Concept: 

    For this project, I felt inspired to make something industrial looking. My first thought went to a factory, as the cabinets on the back wall could be incorporated into conveyor belts pretty easily. I really wanted to transform the whole back wall into something completely different. I also wanted to sync the whole thing up to the song Just One Hit by Ministry, employing different lighting effects and pyrotechnics to light up the scene in a badass manner. The theme behind this piece is that drugs are good for you and your mental health, and that you should take as many as possible.

Techniques:

     I used a similar workflow to the last assignment. I started in Maya by modelling the back wall. After that I modelled the conveyors where the cabinets would be, and modelled all the drugs. After that I once again went through the tedious process of UV unwrapping everything and then exported everything into Substance Painter to create my textures. I then created textures for everything and imported them into Maya. Animating this was pretty tricky, but I had a plan. I placed the 4 items in a looping pattern all along the conveyor and frame by frame moved each object an inch up the conveyor until each item moved up to the spot of the next copy of the same item. This may sound confusing so here is a visual:

Once I had a full loop animated, I copy pasted it a bunch of times until I had 8 loops. For each loop, I had a different light effect. These light effects ranged from red strobing lights to bright plumes of fire shooting upwards. Once I had 8 different cycles rendered, I exported all of the footage into Premiere Pro to cut it up and edit it to go with the flow of the music. A lot of copy and pasting later, and my project was finally complete. Almost. All I had to do after this was throw the mp4 file into MadMapper, adjustment it to fit the back wall and make a few masks, and make the Janus head projection. For the Janus head, I added audio controls so the head would sync up to the music. I created the scorching effect on the head by adding an animation to the lines, playing with the custom settings for a while, and making them glow red. 

Interpretation:

    I think this project turned out sick, and it was definitely my favorite to work on this semester. That being said, there is one minor thing that kinda irks me, that being the choppiness of the animation in some of the transitions. Like I said, animating this was hella tricky. If I were to make this project again, I would try to find a way to animate it so that the items on the conveyor stay smooth and consistent, and don't jump around too much.