The shaky movement you perceive the beginning of the video, is captured using motion capture software. This piece functions like a moving sculpture. I attached squares and a helix, adding additional animations and then a particle system to this piece. This was created using Autodesk Maya and the video edits were done in Adobe Premiere.
Creating this animation had many small steps involved, one of the biggest was prepping the butterfly.
I found a free butterfly model on turbo squid modeling website. The amount of polygon faces was very high. I ended up cleaning and then restructuring some parts of the butterfly to allow for more concise weigh painting and rigging. I soon learned that it would have been much more efficient to model a lower poly version of the butterfly. I then rigged the butterfly to animate a flying movement.
I Next I exported the model over to Mudbox.
I created a custom fire themed airbrush color. Referencing a chemical chart I found online:
See 28 to 38 days for more of the concept behind this piece.
I layered a large amount of different sounds and music together to create the music for the small clip.
Learning Autodesk Maya has been both exhilarating and challenging as an Artist. Before a year ago extruding or moving a vertices was foreign to me. Today I enjoy making small narrative stories with the skills I have learned so far.
I took a a cylinder primitive and then animated it to perform an interesting rhythmic movement. Next, I placed it into a MASH and added random and color nodes. I then took a camera an animated various viewpoints and perspectives.
On the more conceptual side of things, I was exploring the feeling of something that doesn’t belong, what does a dream of an internal struggle look like.
“Feeling at once agitated and confused, your self-torturing reflections, and the emotions accompanying them, whirl ’round and ’round. And although you crave some sort of closure to the stormy commotion inside your brain, no “truce” seems practical. For there’s an almost perfect balance—or more accurately, tension—between the positives and negatives of each alternative you’re anguishing over.” – Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolution-the-self/201504/what-causes-you-inner-turmoil
LINDI