Opas Mühle (vers. 2)
Whether
you
are
a
child or you just love beautiful flowers, Opas Mühle
offers a fantastic environment with several entertaining effects. The
centerpiece is a tacky windmill. Moreover you will discover garden
gnomes, soapbubble, shaking mushrooms and more. Everything can be
synchronized to a musical beat. I included a few different triggering
methods and interactive camera controls like zooming and navigating
around the mill.
The general concept could be thought of as a background projection in
theaters or for musicals. It might also be an interesting example for a
virtual stage in the field of streaming media. Finally this synth is
supplemented with a slightly surreal look of the control panel.
However, everything can be driven by external MIDI controls.
The Idea and Title:
The
inspiration of Opas Mühle came from my little son. One of the very
first words coming out of his mouth was "Mühle".
He was incredibly impressed by a little windmill in my
dads´garden. He is still going "Mühle, Mühle,
Mühle!..." when ever he sees anything looking like a windmill.
I think "computer surreality" is not the best toy for a one year old
child, but since he loves to press any buttons he can get his fingers
on, including resetting computers, and playing with the MIDI Command
Station anyway, I couldn´t resist building him an interactive,
virtual windmill with touch. When I was modelling the mill, the boy
came in and shouted "Mühle, Mühle, Opas Mühle!".
So I got the title. I want to keep this original German title. It means
"Grandpas´ Windmill".
I didn´t make a storyboard, the ideas to fill up the scenes have
been develloped from one day to the other.
The main techniques:
I
took digital photos of the gnomes and the flowers in my
dads´garden and cut out the shapes in Photoshop to have alpha
channel inserted later. I used them as the blinking texture maps on the
floor. The flower pictures are sourced into the compositor. Each flower
has its own phong material to be sourced in a SOP network.
Here I started with a rectangle SOP which is piped into n
Material SOPs. The Material SOPs are piped into a switch SOP, where
Select Input is set to param ("switch", 0). The Switch SOP is the first
input of the following Copy SOP. As the second input I used a grid with
randomly but beat synchronized deleted points. My Copy/Stamp function
which I sourced into the Switch SOP is: switch: $PT%23 (where 23 is n,
the
number
of
inputs). I added copy/stamp params to the sizes and
rotations of the rectangles too. I am also using these techniques for
the blinking stars in the night-mode.
The animations of the gnomes and windows are prekeyframed Constant CHOPs. Together with the related Timing CHOPs, which have n multiples and certain Shift Steps, they are piped into Lookup CHOPs, set to "All Lookup Table Channels". These results are exported to the objects´ scale respective rotation channels. Similar techniques are used for the cinetrix advertising carpet.
The techniques for the wiggly worm crawling about the terrace is derived from the free touch demo of Puffball.toe. There in the wire object, you can get an idea how it is built. I added a rotation in y, where the speed is coming from a Timing CHOP with the same period value as the one of the wiggle frequence itself. For this rotation I used a count and ramp shape instead of the default ramp only. Then I piped this Timing CHOP in a Math CHOP for further adjustments.
The soap bubbles is a simple particle system like in the free demo of Jetgirl.toe. I just added some variations to their colors and sizes with similar copy/stamp params, which I am using for the flowers.
The controll panel:
I
put a mask just in front of the camera plane. The geometry object was
parented to the camera itself. The panelmask is a simple rectangle
followed by a Texture and a Material SOP. The material itself is a
preproduced picture containing alpha, where alpha is specifying the
shape of the non masked area. Due to the usage of realtime-access of
ch("/obj/camout/focal"), the main task was to find a function for the
x- and y-scale channels of the panelmask itself. I created a table as a
result of eyeballing the relation between scaling the panelmask and
changes in camout/focal I have made. The resulting function was
50/ch("/obj/camout/focal") to use in the scale channels of the
panelmask (thanks Greg!).
As I recognized the elliptic panelmask working, I put a corny picture
frame around to prerender it. Then I hung this picture on a wall. I
took some pictures of different parts of my apartement and
"patchworked" them together to source the result as the background
picture in ch/panel/bg. Finally I edited the texturemap of the viewport
again to transit it to the remaining controlpanel map. This has been a
bit a tricky (pixelcounting) 2D work.
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C O N T R O L S
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