synwrks

How it was made

• The 3D model of the mountain itself was sculpted in VR using Adobe Medium, then shaded and textured in Blender.
• Geometry nodes had just been introduced, so I used those to procedurally generate the trees, and have them wave in the wind.
• 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 various parameters of the trees' shape. The fog is also animated in a similar way.
• Python scripts were used to spawn multiple instances of the trees forest, each with slightly different parameters, to add variation and trick the eye into thinking all trees are different even though they are not.
• 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 into the fog/darkness in the distance.
• The circular shimmer spiraling outwards is also animated with similar techniques, but only applied to various noise functions modulating each other within the shader's nodes tree.
• A 180 degrees / stereo 3D version of this loop was also rendered for VR.

Inspiration. I snapped a picture of this mountain in the Italian Alps once. A plane appeared to fly over it just as if going through the middle of an imaginary circle sitting on the rocky walls. Made me think of spaceships flying through a mountain-sized portal.