Information reimagined - OpenText

Back again with yet another entry in the reimagined series. This week we're looking at INFORMATION and how it can be re-imagined. Working on a marketing team for a tech company I have been tasked with visualising information more times than I can recall, and it's always the same challenge: how do we visualise such an abstract nebulous concept such as data, or information?

My idea with this looping animation was to show a generic cartoon-esque machine that turned something generic (the black spheres) into something recognisable (the company logo balloon) as a way to show how the company's solutions turn messy, unstructured data into something human-readable and actionable!

The Process

This concept was cut early on in the process so I don't have a lot of early works to show. Below you can see me working through what GOBO to use.

Working with simulations can be very resource-intensive, and I have found the simulation cache in Blender to be less than reliable. To get around these problems, we need to create our scenes in a more intelligent way. Enter the MDD file format made by our friends at NewTek of Tricastor fame! We can use the MDD to store our simulation, simply export the simulation and then reimport the MDD file. We get a mesh that contains a shape key for each frame of the cached simulation, as seen below. This allows us to duplicate the simulated shape over and over again, add position or scale adjustments/animation ALL while maintaining a very performant scene.

Materials

With this project I continued to explore the idea of creating a collection of branded materials. This one features another grid, which I used as the primary background.

The graph here shows using a Voronoi texture to drive the grid texture. IT was designed to be very simple and very controllable. The same mindset I had when working on all of the materials in this set. The tools offered in Blender's shader editor offer a near limitless amount of possibilities. As exemplified here using the Voronoi texture in a way that might not seem obvious at first!

Conclusion

This specific animation, while being incredibly simple, offered a great amount of problem-solving opportunities in the form of the complex cloth simulations. Overcoming the performance problem that was presented by using a point cloud cache saved hours of frustration and a great amount of sanity.