Phantom

The majority of this piece is made up of instanced meshes and flowing tendrils attached to the body of an animated humanoid. I used C# Jobs and compute shaders for texture generation, implementing the tendril simulation through spring physics and Perlin noise calculations on parallel CPU processes.

Using a rigged female body mesh and dancer mocap data from the CMU mocap library, I built a system for echoing the history of the model’s dance animation. The piece layers clones with varying shaders to create a narrative of transformation and ethereal stillness synchronized to the musical composition.

The idea for this piece is about the interpretation of loss of data, where through progressively “bit crushing” a signal (reducing the range of values with which it can be expressed), you deteriorate it to the point where it is no longer recognizable. VFX Graph creates pulsing sinusoidal waves displacing cube grids with animated emissive brightness.

This elaborate piece features a choreographed dance performed between four automatons. The dance was choreographed and performed by myself using an XSens suit for motion capture, drawing inspiration from Cirque du Soleil and taiko drumming aesthetics.

This was the first piece that deviated from the dark / moody / dreamy aesthetic, and entered into more synthwave / retro graphics territory. I experimented with real-time voxelization of skinned meshes and RGB delay aesthetics to visualize the protagonist’s journey through stylized artificial intelligence.

This continuation explores more synthwave musical elements and RGB delay like visuals using procedural grids that ran through the landscape, of course inspired by Tron light cycles.

This was a pivotal piece for me because it was the inception of what is now becoming a central aesthetic in the film: soft emissive line and dot patterns. I developed a texture-based system storing position data for particle strips and quads, later upgrading to compute buffers in Unity 2021.

One of my favorite pieces in this style, Hyper Cube uses a special vertex shader to animate all of the moving elements in the environment. Data embedded in the vertices enables independent object movement within a unified mesh, with custom gradient reflections creating rainbow metallic surfaces.

This final piece aims to evoke a feeling of mystery and sacredness as the avatar approaches consciousness. Elaborate dot and line patterns based on the Menger sponge fractal were generated through a Houdini pipeline to guide the visual descent.