3D Movie -- Memory Palace
Large Size: 480 x 360 (200 MB)
Use Save Link As... (or similar) to save the project to your hard drive. This will give you smoother playback.
This four-and-a-half minute movie is the final project of a 3D-design course using the Cinema 4D software application. The concept behind the project was to create a "virtual digital memory palace" which would serve as a container for information. I chose a design which gives the idea of an abstract circuit board in which information is constantly pulsing and flowing. Within the animation are three embedded animations, created and rendered separately, then applied as textures to objects within the main movie. The central elements include the dynamic textures which represent the flow of information, the exploratory camera motion which focuses upon various elements of the board in turn, and the three embedded animations. Finally, the circuit board appears from and disappears into a seemingly infinite background, thus giving the notion that there are millions of other boards in the virtual universe ... each with their own world of information continuously coursing through them.
Over the course of the semester, the students completed a number of smaller projects in order to familiarize ourselves with the program and its possibilities. (One example of this is the TV Room I created, found on the 3D Samples page.) We were to experiment with modeling shapes, creating and applying textures and materials, using lighting and cameras, and creating timelines for animating motion and camera angles. Each project would also be saved in a number of formats and at a number of sizes-there was a lot of experimentation necessary to determine the best results for each given project, as the file-size versus quality versus rendering time is a BIG issue here and in most 3D or video projects.
The rest of the students in the class created relatively realistic scenes: one was a three-part theatrical stage complete with lighting and props, while another was a castle complete with grounds and several large open areas. They spent a long time getting their shapes and textures to look realistic and create a sense of a true virtual reality. As a result, their movies were relatively short and their animation consisted only of camera motion; however, the strength was in the detail of the objects-textures, placement, size, overall architecture, etc.
I chose to create a different kind of project: that is, my shapes were all relatively simple, but the textures and objects were dynamic rather than static; there were three embedded mini-movies within the project (separately created and rendered, and applied as textures); and the movie itself was relatively long (4:30), with considerable camera motion. The overall effect was intended to look like a kind of abstract memory circuit board in which each area had information constantly pulsing around and about, and within several of the animated objects, there existed "sub-worlds" of information :: in this case, from other movies I had created.
In order to periodically check the progress of the finished project, it is necessary to render the movie. Even at a very small movie resolution and length, this can take a long time, as each frame needs to be rendered individually. The completed project is 4 minutes and 30 seconds, is rendered at 640 x 480 pixels, and even using a highly compressed format, is approximately 250 megabytes. At 20 frames per second, this means over 5000 frames were required. At the time, the full movie took nearly 15 hours to render!
This was one of the most challenging projects I have attempted in my Arts Technology experience, most notably due to the complexity of the software. I had some previous experience with the program in another class, but was still at a very novice level when I started this project :: it took literally months of experimentation and fine-tuning to get to this point... and now I'll all about generative and interactive 3D instead, heh.
Because the project is so large, viewing it in a browser nearly always causes stuttering in playback due to losses in data transfer. For best results, save the movie to your Desktop or elsewhere on your hard drive. Hard drives read data much more quickly than CD drives or network connections, so for data-heavy projects like this one, playback will be much smoother. Put on some tunes of your choosing (I like some flavor of reflective ambient or techno for this particular project) and enjoy!