Insomnia, anxiety, growth, change, ego death; these were all themes I wantedto represent. There was a lot going on in my head, I just needed to let it out.
I didn't focus too much on a narrative for this project. I wanted the visual elements to be more metphorical and abstract. The viewer would follow the visual journey along with the music.
At the time, I was obsessed with EDM visuals, and VJ'ing (Visual Jockey). I wanted to make visuals that could fit behind any of the biggest Electronic artists. My ambitions took me over, and I tried to make the biggest baddest visuals I could.
This two-piece music video was a massive undertaking. Before this point I had only made 2-3 minute animations, never something at this scale and length. Ending at around 8 minutes, this is defintely one of the longer pieces I've done.
INSOMNIA and REBRITH were the first songs I ever released. I wanted the release to be unique and memorable so I decided to release a set of visuals with the music.
INSOMNIA and REBIRTH
EXTRA IMAGES
PROCESS
Animation
This was the first time I rigged and animated myself, and I honestly have to say I am pretty pleased with the results. Obviously it's not anything ground-breaking but I did what I wanted to do with the limited skills I had at the time. I had purchased the bone and hand assets online, but unrigged to save money. Then I rigged, weight painted, and animated everything in C4D.
Mandelbulb
The mandelbulb was defintely the most intense element of the entire animation. I was planning on doing it in Houdini like I did in my research page on fractals. But, that instantly proved to be too computationally intensive for something this size. I ended up using Octane's Vectron plugin that had a preset for mandelbulbs. This drastically improved viewport speed ... but not rendering time. I then cloned this Vectron object, and animated the clones in order to get the effect I wanted.
Render times for these scenes were about 35-45 minutes per frame ... I do not recommend doing this unless you have the time to spare, or a beefy computer.
Planets
The planets were fairly simple to create. The only issue I ran into was finding realistic, Hi-Res planet textures. I searched everywhere, but ended up using images from NASA/JPL, and JHT's Planetary Pixel Emporium. Some were still low-res, so I AI upscaled them to about 8K. I made a folder that has the whole solar system, if you want to use them for your own work just contact me here.
