More selected projects

Environmental Damage and Faking 3D

produced by: Siyuan Wu

 

This project is designed as an environment-related project, using three different scenes to imply the concept of industry/nature resource, the interrupted vital force, and the noisy signal.

In technical aspects, this project is mainly focused on structures, with all of these three scenes tried different methods to generate 3D-like images in 2D space.

Scene 1­­: Industry

With three cubes waiting to be drawn on, the first scene “Industry” was focused on using codes to simulate different materials. By generating patterns and faking lights, this scene gave the cubes a tortuous petroleum-like surface, which points to the concept of industry and the natural resource behind it.

The generate of the pattern was benefited from an algorithm called Domain Warping. It is an embranchment of fBm (Fractal Brownian Motion), which use fBm on another fBm to warp purlin noise, in order to generate a highly pleated noise function we can work on. In this case, Domain Warping is used to produce the highlights of petroleum and give it a sticky texture. What is super helpful is, as the core of Domain Warping is still noise, we can easily make animated floating material with the old method. 

 

  • gallery-image
  • gallery-image
 
Scene 2: Pulse

“Pulse” is a scene that points to the concept of the vital force of nature. However, as the pulse happens randomly, the harmonious beauty of the pulse is interrupted.

In this scene, each surface of the cubes contains an active tube, where random pulses are triggered by an if(random) function

The trigonometric functions are useful algorithms, especially when generating elegant and regular shapes without edges. In this scene, I used a group of ellipses to represent the blood vessel, while the width of ellipses are related to their x coordinate, the height are influenced by a sine function, in order to generate the image of blood flow through the blood vessels.

 

 
Scene 3: Flash

The scene “Flash” focused on the structure of the cubes, by trying to make them look like open boxes. It is designed to make the human’s visual system uncomfortable and uses stripes to deceive human visual senses.

 

 

The flash in this scene is also decided automatically by the program by using noise value in an if function, to generate an irregular flicker, in order to disturb the human visual system. Also, by using patterns and fake shadows, I tried to make the plane surfaces of the cubes look like containers’ surface. Most importantly, by arranging the surfaces in a certain way like above, combined with a specific camera angle, it made an illusion that we can see inside surfaces of the cubes.

Reference:

[1] The Book of Shaders: Fractal Brownian Motion

Patricio Gonzalez Vivo & Jen Lowe

https://thebookofshaders.com/13/

 

[2] Domain Warping

https://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/warp/warp.htm