synwrks

How it was made

• The 3D model of the rods at the sides of the road was sculpted in VR using Adobe Medium.
• Geometry Nodes weren't yet a thing, so this was made using a plugin called "Animation Nodes".
• As for most of my loops, the crucial challenge lies in describing their movement mathematically, so that it can both look natural but also loop seamlessly (this is a 16 seconds video in total). This is done mostly by summing and multiplying a number of sinusoids and other periodic functions to control the waving of grass in the wind.
• The camera is fixed at origin (0,0,0) to keep the numbers easy to reason about. The landscape is comprised of multiple identical "slices" that are moved towards it.
• In order to hide the "seam" when new tiles are added at the front, the repeating landscape disappears at the horizon as each "slice" is positioned along a curve that slowly arches downward in the distance, artificially simulating a planet's curvature (but at a much smaller scale).
• A 180 degrees / stereo 3D version of this loop was also rendered for VR.
• If a layer is marked as 'AI Layer', it means that I took one of the 3D-rendered layers and, in the summer of 2022, passed it through an image-to-image stable diffusion AI model frame-by-frame via a python script. This was before AI videos were a thing, so the results aren't perfect and by all counts very experimental, but they were often good enough to add some variation to the layers I could then play with in compositing.

Inspiration. While driving through some fields of what seemed tall grass, I noticed its motion as it was pushed by gusts of wind. It was crested by slow-moving waves, hypnotically dancing in the sunset light. It gave me a profound feeling of relaxation and appreciation for nature, which motivated me to try capture it in a seamless loop.