Presentation
ArcheType
"an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery, derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious."
"Yeah, right, whatever..." That’s what most would say concerning a pseudo intellectual line like that....
So, how did it come about? What’s the story behind the creation of this piece and why is it named like that?
Lets go back a few months.…
I was very interested in movement on sound. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could have my objects in 3ds Max to react on sound?
I’m not sure where this interest comes from, that I like to watch sound visualizations, like those things in Windows Media Player... I can watch it for "hours," the music particles becoming alive starting to dance in perfect harmony, ok, ok I'm drifting off here.…
What would do this in 3ds Max?
I started searching on Google, and after many tries, I finally found the plugin I was looking for. It allowed me to have any variable applied to an object in Max to be animatable based on the wavelength of the audio track. So, "Yeah, great!!!" I thought. I watched the examples, downloaded the demo... it all worked, accept of course for rendering, right... it was of course a demo.
So I actually went back to the site to purchase the plugin, entered my credit card number, and... "We currently are not able to process your... please contact us here…" And so I did. I sent them an email and... never got a reply.
Guess what? After going thru some help files in Max the same thing was actually possible, maybe not as detailed as the plugin but it was a standard option in the Trackview, hehe, thank god they never replied to that email, it saved me 300 bucks. ;)
So there I went, happily experimenting, making particles get larger and smaller on the beat, getting objects to move over their axes, you name it, I tried it. :)
Well, what now? So I can have my objects do whatever I want on the beat of the music but how am I going to apply this for an animation? See, I wanted to make something more then a bunch of shapes floating around on a drumm + base track.
Let’s move further back in time.
Being fairly bored with making abstract shapes, I wanted to teach myself how to really model things: cars, humans, etc.
Surely this is no easy task (I’m still learning intensely), I never had any formal lessons in 3d software and basically I miss all the fundamentals.
Anyway, I was completely dedicated to learning, going thru tons of tutorials, the works.
I got to a certain point where I modeled a game-like character. I was fairly pleased with it back then and decided to bring the object to life by creating a bone structure for it and rigging it... and there, I just opened the door to Hell.
Rigging a character is no fun. First of all, creating a bone structure, look at your own bones see how they move and see what their limitations are, now set all those parameters in your 3d application.
After much sweat and tears, I managed to get a bone structure, and now I needed to "attach" it to the model.
I won’t go into too much detail on how that’s done, before this becomes a tutorial... but let’s just say that if you do it wrong, some points (vertexes) of the model remain in the same place. Imagine having a nail thru your foot and walking forward, some stuff will stay in place. ;)
A lot of cursing followed: "Why the fuck can’t I get this right? Why the fuck does my model look like crap? It all fucking sucks!" *Move to Bin… Empty Bin*
Do you know that feeling when you see something in your mind but you just can’t create it? It’s like drawing something on paper but it turns out horrible. You can’t progress, you’re stuck, you get frustrated, depressed, fuck everything.…
HEY!!! Calm down Joost, get a grip... You needed a theme for your sound driven animation right? And there you have it!
Make an animation about your frustrations, make an animation about that demon inside you that keeps you from progressing, and apply everything to it that you have learned so far, to move on to something else... an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery, derived from the past collective experience and present in the individual unconscious.
One month later, ArcheType was done.
Time to move on.
Joost Korngold
http://www.renascent.nl
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