Monday, November 25, 2013

"Decoherence" Music Video


Decoherence from backtrace music on Vimeo.

I've started making some music videos to go with the tracks from Pythagorean Clouds and a few other pieces.  I got a new computer last week with a GPU card which, combined with the new OpenCL rendering in the new version of Mandelbulber (1.19) lets me render certain kinds of animations very quickly.

The animation in this video is a transformation of a Mandelbox, which took about half a day to render at 1280x720px.  The current OpenCL implementation only allows for a few basic fractal formulas to be rendered, and it's a little crashy on Windows. But it's super fast - cranking out almost 100 frames per minute sometimes, compared to maybe getting 1 frame per minute if I was lucky with my previous setup.  I can't do anything with volumetric shaders right now, but I'm kind of getting into this aesthetic.  Flat surfaces, "perfect" lighting with no depth of field.  (I feel like if there's too many shading effects, you fall into the uncanny valley of being super conscious that you're watching a computer-generated video, and not really being able to experience the visuals for what they are)  Because the algorithm gets glitchy when you zoom too close, I've been trying out different effects where the camera stays still and the fractal morphs around it. Overall though I like working within the constraints of a medium, especially when it's kind of minimal and lo-fi, so this works for me.