Secret Garden

This product is the first of a new series and as such it was important to make it a statement.
Audio Imperia had a clear vision about what the art direction and inspiration should be. An evocative background, lush, organic, blending nature and story telling without reducing the window to a specific genre.

Execution plan

generative 3D

Early on I was pretty convinced that the right path was procedural geometry. This for me the most effective way to achieve organic motion while keeping the flexibility needed to be responsive on feedback.

A big part of the work was therefore put into building geonodes based systems in Blender to generate vines that follow random paths, stem in random places of the vines, flowers at the end of each stem, different grass below water surface.

1 +1 = 1

The instrument has two main Macros and the motion design brief was to bind the animations to those. It was important for me to try and make both animations to overlap rather than remain around the knob they are responding to. This way the animated artwork feels like a single interactive scene rather than two isolated displays.

Challenges

The challenge with such a decision is that a rasterised production featuring overlaping elements needs to accomodate for the potential glitches such an implementation can generate.

In this project’s case it was the fact that the grass gets into the water while the bubbles, which are technically also in the water, should be able to come above the grass.

The other challenge was that water surface is also animated and get crossed by the grass. On top of that for an asset that is almost the size of the entire display one needs to avoid having too many layers and be savvy on the number of frames per animations.

Solutions

In order to get something like this done

• at all
• in time
• with respect the pipeline limitations and best practices from production to implementation

The designer must know each part of the process, including in this case Kontakt and both KSP/NGL and/or NUI technical constraints and benefits in order to tailor a solution that keeps everything reasonable.

In the end of the day the technical context always plays a critical part in informing the design:
If the designer ignores the context, either the result will remain way under what is possible or risk to hit the feasibility wall.