synwrks

How it was made

• The 3D models of the trees were sculpted in VR using Adobe Medium.
• Geometry Nodes weren't yet a thing, so this was animated using a plugin called "Animation Nodes".
• As for most of my loops, the crucial challenge lies in describing all 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.

Inspiration. Always been a fan of Tim Burton's movies. I wanted to play with the idea of alien trees from a distant planet inheriting from that style a little bit.