Time Temple
2023
The Granting Voice's arrival was often announced by distant cataclysms. Stars would artificially be collapsed into black holes for the production of energy, close-by gas giants would shrink into nothingness. Developing civilizations would often see these developments as a sign of angry gods, and devolve enormous resources to erecting temples for their appeasement.
Nobody had walked through this one in many centuries. Here, statues of now-extinct monks try hold onto the passage of time, which however steadily slips through their fingers, like fine sand into the wind.
Read the Background Story →How it was made
- The 3D model of the statues and architectural elements were sculpted in VR using Adobe Medium.
- Geometry nodes were used to procedurally build out and animate the scene. Things like the grass, the shimmering sunlight pattern in the distance, the sand slipping through the statues' hands.
- 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.
Inspiration. I imagined this walk through an infinite roof-less cathedral while visiting the beautiful Carmo Convent in Lisbon. I snapped a few pictures while there and used them as reference while 3D sculpting.
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