Microscopic Music Video

[Ibanessie]

Most recent version:
Scene 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r34a_0E18I

Hey you all
I wanted to share a project that I am currently working on with my buddy.
We are making a music video for a prog metal band. It contains real filmed performance parts from the band and a little story told in 3D. The Story basicly shows a body dying from a inside view.
We want the style to be somewhere in between real microscopic and ‘made up stuff that looks cool’. Our focus is to produce visually stunning images (the story is second to that).
We probably will flood the forum with technical questions but I wanted to start this post to share the process with you guys. I am looking forwards to your feedback, critiques and opions on what we are doing in both a artistic and technical point of view (since we are trying to build something high quality here)

So much about the project overall, here is our current status:

We started to build scene 1, which contains a tracking shot from a guitar cable (also 3D) into a vein.

Here is a shot from what we did build so far:

It shows one of our 4 main actors, the first cell that gets attacked inside the body. The vein in the background is the “envoirment” for scene 1. We pretty much allways want to work with such a small focal area.
Right now we only have still renders and no animation.
Since almost all models for this scene are finished we will start and build the complete scene to bring it all together and start animating. So for the next update we will probably hit you with a playblast.

We are looking forwards for your thoughts

[Gibby565]

This looks good. I like the concept for this as a music video and look forward to seeing the finished thing!

[Ibanessie]

@Gibby: thank you very much, I am glad you like the concept!

The animations are almost ready, so the OpenGL Render of it will come soon.
This time I just want to show some of the inhabitans of the blood vessel:

First, the most obvious one, a red blood cell

We also have some deformed ones that we use further in the video (when the body is closer to die)

Next up a thromocyte

And here is a virus (its not a specific one, we just made what we thought would be pretty)

At the beginning there will be mainly “healthy stuff” in the vessel and the longer the video is playing, more and more bacteria etc will show.

[3pointEdit]

I love the style here, really nice design and pallet. How have you achieved the rough surfaces? Is this the new micropoly displacement or just the traditional normal displace?

[Ibanessie]

@3pointEdit: Thank you so much <3
yeah its the new micro displacement, its soooo dang cool we use it for pretty much everything now.

Like promised here is the first playblast (aka openGL render)

(the empty is the focus of the cam) I think we are ready to render it! Will show the results if our pcs didnt burn down

[Ibanessie]

Here is the finished scene!

Its only a short scene, but I am pleased with the result!

I guess we will re-render the beginning since the displacement of the cable is a little too extrem and the shader needs some fine-tuning.

[3pointEdit]

Really cool! Cant believe how authentic that cable looks. Only thing I would mention is the lighting seems a bit off in the microscopic world at the end. You may need more rim lights to make it read on screen?

[pingrey]

Wow, it is amazing! I really like this video. I was just searching for some more information on this topic because I wanna write about it in my blog. Thank you for sharing! I wish you luck!

[Ibanessie]

Thank you so much 3pointEdit!
You are absolutely right with the rim lights! We basicly only put in the ambient light D: (realized after your post)
We try to play around with the light a bit. We filled in some rim light, it makes the first protagonist pop a little more but it still needs some work.

[Ibanessie]

Long time no see! We worked hard in the meanwhile

We did build all the charakter that we need for the Video
I may present the main charakters:

This character is based on a bakteriophage, a virus. This kinda the villian in our story, it attacks the blob that you can see in scene 1. We wanted to go for a scorpion kinda look for it

Next is the leukocyt:

It tries to defend the body by eating the intruder and its victim. Cthulhu look included xD

It transforms into the last character: the monster

It is the fusion of the bakteriophage and the leukocyt. Its supposed to look like a foreign body in this world.

Now we are very busy animating, I keep you updated! I hope we can hit you with some new animated scenes soon
Critics are very welcome