Synthopolis video arrives
Tuesday, September 18 2012 @ 12:17 PM CDT

I'm posting the music video in the forum here, since the song I just uploaded doesn't have a great place to embed the accompanying video, and I am a little excited to finally show what I've been working on for the past few weeks (yes, it was pretty complicated to create this video!) Here's the music description, and the video:

This romp started as a musical doodle on the iPad while I was playing with GarageBand. Because of my initial choice of the synthesizer-heavy voices, my quick working title for this music became "Synthopolis". Well, as is always the case, not only did the working title stick, but it began to take on a life of its own in my mind. I first used Harmony Assistant to write out the entire piece from its humble iPad beginning sketch. The working title (and the march-like processional that this became as I extended the music), evoked a sparkly city parade, but in miniature. A little synthetic city with its own celebration day. So I designed and programmed a city of random and unusual buildings and a parade of shiny floats, and used my trusty 3D computer animation tool, POV-Ray, to animate the fly-throughs, with a healthy dose of focal-blur to give it the feel of a tiny model. Hopefully this will bring you back to the days of disappearing into your world of Legos, model trains, etc. I had a lot of fun with the details, creating the myriad flags and float types… and I always thought water towers should be made of water, though these turned out to look a bit like LEDs. As always, any critical feedback about the music/video, is welcomed!



Now, back to the job search for me! :-)

ttfn,
Drakonis/ic42/Eduard

Re:Synthopolis video arrives
Tuesday, September 18 2012 @ 03:07 PM CDT

Somewhat quaint and yet... very cool, Eduard.

How long does it take to composite and render these types of scenes?

Re:Synthopolis video arrives
Tuesday, September 18 2012 @ 03:27 PM CDT

WOW, Eduard that's way cool, I am very impressed with your great work.

Re:Synthopolis video arrives
Tuesday, September 18 2012 @ 04:59 PM CDT

Quote by: J.A.Stewart Somewhat quaint and yet... very cool, Eduard. How long does it take to composite and render these types of scenes?

NERD ALERT: I'll definitely take "quaint" as a compliment, I was trying to get a simplistic/cute feel for things, which ironically takes a LOT of design work! Soft building textures, bevelled edges on the weird air-conditioning units, calculating the parabolic trajectories so that the balls bounce in a physically correct way, making some building windows rounded (but not on the first floor), insuring each flag had a unique pattern on it, etc! Designing each shape, movement, and color from basic shapes (boxes, spheres, cones) took a couple of weeks of evenings... and these were all written out in a text language, not dragged around visually on the screen, so it took a bit longer to figure out where to put things. Then I would render an entire scene (there are 7 scenes total in the movie). These are 1280x720 (high-def) images, played back at 15 images-per-second, which means that one (20-second) scene would have about 300 images, and it was taking one of my Macs about 2 minutes to render ONE image... so to create a 20-second animation would take my computer (2 minutes times 300 images) about 10 hours. That meant that I couldn't make too many "test" runs :-) In the end, I had all 3 Macs in our house running the rendering software for several days and nights, cranking out animation frames, then assembling the frames into scenes that I loaded into Final Cut to do the transitions and timeline-adjusting with the music, and created the movie.

Thank you for watching, enjoying, and being interested enough to ask nerdy questions! :-)

ttfn,
Eduard

Re:Synthopolis video arrives
Wednesday, September 19 2012 @ 03:26 AM CDT

Quote by: ic42 Quote by: J.A.Stewart Somewhat quaint and yet... very cool, Eduard. How long does it take to composite and render these types of scenes? NERD ALERT: I'll definitely take "quaint" as a compliment, I was trying to get a simplistic/cute feel for things, which ironically takes a LOT of design work! Soft building textures, bevelled edges on the weird air-conditioning units, calculating the parabolic trajectories so that the balls bounce in a physically correct way, making some building windows rounded (but not on the first floor), insuring each flag had a unique pattern on it, etc! Designing each shape, movement, and color from basic shapes (boxes, spheres, cones) took a couple of weeks of evenings... and these were all written out in a text language, not dragged around visually on the screen, so it took a bit longer to figure out where to put things. Then I would render an entire scene (there are 7 scenes total in the movie). These are 1280x720 (high-def) images, played back at 15 images-per-second, which means that one (20-second) scene would have about 300 images, and it was taking one of my Macs about 2 minutes to render ONE image... so to create a 20-second animation would take my computer (2 minutes times 300 images) about 10 hours. That meant that I couldn't make too many "test" runs :-) In the end, I had all 3 Macs in our house running the rendering software for several days and nights, cranking out animation frames, then assembling the frames into scenes that I loaded into Final Cut to do the transitions and timeline-adjusting with the music, and created the movie. Thank you for watching, enjoying, and being interested enough to ask nerdy questions! :-) ttfn, Eduard

Thanks for the explanation and info, Eduard. I did use the term *quaint* as a compliment. On some level your animation suggested The Village of The Prisoner fame to me.

I have a friend who is a computer animator in Hollywood and I've asked him about rendering time, but he's just indicated it takes a lot of time — he's never been as specific as you've been about your project. Nicely done, Eduard.

Re:Synthopolis video arrives
Wednesday, September 19 2012 @ 10:01 AM CDT

cool! i really like all the little details...

and thanks for the detailed explanation of how you did it

Re:Synthopolis video arrives
Wednesday, September 19 2012 @ 10:19 AM CDT

EDUARD!!! this is fabulous - wowzers! thanks for the post and the description - so impressive!

Re:Synthopolis video arrives
Wednesday, September 19 2012 @ 11:53 AM CDT

Quote by: ic42 so to create a 20-second animation would take my computer (2 minutes times 300 images) about 10 hours.

That's of a whole nother magnitude than what our music software does...

Really enjoyed the parade. Good complement to the music.

Victor.

Re:Synthopolis video arrives
Wednesday, September 19 2012 @ 10:02 PM CDT

Impressive. Reminds me of SimCity but with better music. The parade was the best part, I thought. Thanks for the entertaining post. You done good.

Re:Synthopolis video arrives
Thursday, September 20 2012 @ 10:54 AM CDT

Must be a week for videos. Very impressive! Splendid work