Wow, I haven’t actually publicly posted a real CG-focused project in a while, so why not start again with my attempt at recreating imagery from the movie that traumatized me in the theater at four years old when my three older sisters and uncle took me to see it instead of Tweety Bird Goes Round The World In Eighty Days, without telling me beforehand.
I’ve been on a bender reading about late 90s developments in CGI. Optical Flow has kept my interest and I’ve dived into the history, I’ve spent the last month researching What Dreams May Come, even contacting one of the gentlemen that made it happen. That’s all for plans of an episode of a series of shorts I make, this project might be for a music video or something, I haven’t decided yet.
So I started off trying to do the Geometry Nodes myself and figure it out through the various avenues of getting answers I have, which really ended up confusing everyone including myself. My jumping off point was this video for the cascading code on curves, and from there I wanted to be able to map it to objects, and I made a simple watch body to test it out on, not great for presentation but I might be able to figure it out. Using Raycasting I was able to capture my watch collection, but it casts at an angle, so I tried to incorporate casting from points of an icosphere around the watch which sort of worked, maybe, but I think I did it wrong and that there’s a better way.
After that, I had stray characters accumulating in the center of my object, so I had to incorporate a culling, which then made my material no longer like my Multiply math node to get my alpha and I changed it to Add and it got better. It’s okay, this only stressed me out for two days. Thanks to this guy Bradley, who takes time out of his day to dig through my chaos of creation to produce a simple and straight forward answer. Great dude.
I have a bit of a roadmap of where I want to go with this, I already have a few issues I’d like to iron out. The Raycasting is a big one, I have issues working out the source position, stuff likes to disappear. I set up a Gradient Texture to fade in the characters from the top of the screen, but it makes the characters change position schizophrenically so I didn’t use it. I also tried to make the characters consistently orient themselves straight and not backwards or upside down but that’s still an issue. Also I’ve extruded the characters but they don’t have a backface and I haven’t found the right node group to fix it. I want this to happen so I can add volume to them to make them feel more in the void. I might like to add motion trails, it feels like it would be appropriate, I’d also like the ability to add characters dropping off of objects and then fading out, perhaps with physics so they’d bounce off a floor. Not sure if Geo Nodes can pull that off or if I’d have to use a separate system somehow.
Anyways, here’s the nodes, and I’ll provide blends as I go so if anyone wants to play around with it and make their own improvements they can, or if someone in the future is searching around like I am wanting to do the same. I welcome any feedback, I’m really glad to be back and able to create again.
