Engineering reimagined - OpenText

The team and I were asked to create loopable animations that would act as webpage backgrounds for various corporate campaign webpages. That was it, the entire ask, total creative freedom! Beyond that we were given just a handful of words, including Engineering reimagined. This felt like the perfect time to flex some 3D design skills and below are the results of some noodling around in Blender.

The Process

The animation above is the result of many rounds of feedback that I Greg Johns the animator, diligently worked through. So, in the following section, let me present you with some of the other versions that this animation went through.

Below, you can see the viewport view of the original render. This is where I fell in love with curve-based modelling. Almost all the objects you can see below began as a curve path before being converted and extruded into proper meshes. This method gives us extremely smooth shapes with great accuracy, and the power behind this method is the included Curve Tools Add-on. If you haven't stumbled upon that gem yet, please take a look!

Compositing

Let's take a second to talk about the compositing.

This was one of the first projects I decided to take a deep dive into what can be done with Blender's compositing tools. Myself, having an extensive After Effects background I found it to be a bit of a challenge to adapt those skills to Blender's node-based compositing workflow (AND yes, I realise node-based compositing is the industry standard, I've just been raised on AFTER EFFECTS)

The node tree above is for the image below. I had a lot of fun trying to develop some unique glowy bloom effects for this piece. Anyone who knows me will attest to my love for bloom! The most unique part of this comp is the directional streak on the yellow object. This was achieved with some careful cryptomatting and various transform and blur nodes.

Materials

Where do I begin? The shadder editor in Blender is a great deal of fun to mess around with. Every material in this scene was made through trial and error, experimenting with different techniques.

The node graph above is for the orange data cube that ended up getting scrapped before the final draft. It contained a lot of little details that likely were not perceivable to the end user. Such as a procedurally animated data matrix on the side of it, and you can see the simple logic for that in the top left of the graph.

All of the materials in this scene attempted to convey a high-tech feel, something rooted in math and science. I attempted to create a simple grid that most of the later materials were based on. The glass tubes, for example, were meant to represent trace on an integrated circuit board.

Conclusion

In the end we didn't use any of the animations created for this project. They have lived on a hard drive on my computer waiting to see the light of day for years, so Im glad to finally be able to share the process and learnings with you all. MY key takeaway from this project was that things don't need to be perfect. Your client is never going to see how perfect the geometry is or how much of a technical feat the materials you created are. In the end, if it looks pretty and the client is happy, nothing else really matters.