Student: Pasha Eghtesadi Bahrami
Genre: SciFI / Comedy / Music video
Length: 94 seconds
Format: MP4
Production technique: 3D modeling, 3D animation,
Photogrammetry, Compositing
Software: Agisoft Metashape, Blender 2.9, After Effects
Music: Sebastian Böhm

DANCING
ALIEN JESUS

My short video is a funny music video taking place in a dream. A dream starting in a bedroom taking you through time and space to a place where a beautiful creature made out of shiny and colourful gems awaits you. This creature, seemingly lifeless at first, is somehow alive. It’s edgy limbs are full of motion and vibrance. It looks so impressive and heroic, so majestic. If I didn’t know better, I would say it’s Jesus. Wait is it twerking?

Breakdown

First things first, this might be a longer read than you and I might have expected it to be but it’s late and I am feeling creative. I am going to tell you delightfully the technical parameters and problem solvings I went through.


    I was sure about one thing. I wanted to do something I usually avoid to do. I had got the advice to do things in more abstract way. Unusual for me, because I like to achieve photorealism. There is a reasoning behind that. I’ve been told and learnt: “first achieve photorealism and learn how things work in reality and then try to abstract them.”. I never felt the readiness to create anything abstract because I felt that I still have a lot to learn before the next step comes.


    So how did I create these things? One day I was browsing YouTube and saw an amazing video and found a small studio that creates these incredible short videos that feel so impulsive and intense. They capture just a busy street or a market and create a point cloud of that scenery. Inside Unity they created this marvelous shader to not only render these points that then can be lit but to dissolve them as the virtual camera approaches. It looks insanely good and satisfying.


    Inspired by this, I started my research. How can I create a point cloud? Oh, easy! Basically the same process as photogrammetry with the addition of just telling the software that combines, calculates and creates all the magic out of the taken photos, to stop at the last step and give out the point cloud instead of the mesh. But then a more difficult problem emerged. How do I render this point cloud? My software of choice is Blender and a task had yet to come, which of Blender is not capable to handle. Unfortunately that task was finally found. Blender was not able to handle point clouds natively. Thanks to the community and an addon, I was able to frankenstein Blender into a software that could render point clouds - at the cost of control. I was not able to light the cloud and had to go with whatever lighting I captured in my photos. Furthermore I was not able to use fancy tricks like a depth of field since the camera and rendering system of the addon are not compatible with Blender’s native systems. So be it. I can fake it. I synched a camera path that I set manually, that is as fun as you can imagine, and coloured everything in After Effects. But how do I get more motion into these devious particles? A turbulent Displace at my service did the job astonishingly good and bad at the same time. I can live with it. It’s fine.


   

At this part of my project, I still had no idea how to implement a character into these crazy particles. I played around in Blender. A lot. Suddenly I had created a nice sculpt by accident. Of course, as lazy as I am, I had no intention of creating a proper remesh. (That’s usually required because a sculpture in 3D has a messy geometry and is unnecessary heavy for the software and difficult to work with. A remesh means creating clean and proper topology for the geometry.) I used the power given to us by Ton Roosendaal (Blender’s creator.) and used the remesh and decimate modifiers in hope that I would get a nice remesh out of it. Oh boy, have I been wrong. At first when I saw the result I was like: “OK.”. The mesh was destroyed. Where did just the upper part of the mouth go? What happened to the horns? What is this? After a few minutes of trying to get an autosave running (Ingeniously I use the current Alpha version of the next Blender release and hadn’t set up enough undo steps.), I had to come in terms with the current state of the mesh. Hell, I was not going to sculpt that night again. So it was settled, the mesh stays holed and destroyed. The next day, with a clear mind, I sat down and was going to restart the sculpt process and it was at this moment I realised: “It’s not bad. It’s actually good.”. I played around with the decimate modifier and it looked even more destroyed, actually it was nothing alike the original anymore. It was ABSTRACT! Just three polygons were left. This gave me the idea. I can use an animation noise modifier and procedurally animate the decimate modifier’s value and create this glitchy and abstract (just wanted to drop the word abstract once more to emphasize how abstract my work is and how abstract is now the center of my world. Abstract.). We are talking about the devil face you can see in the background circling right now, if you were asking.


    The coming days I tried to achieve something similar to this beautiful creation that I hated at first. I failed. I don’t know why. Everything ended up being very detailed and not as cool as the devil. So how did I end up creating the Jesus character? Well it was sculpted yet again but this time a bit differently.

    I didn’t tell you but I always sculpted just the heads. I had plans to make cloth simulations for the body and leave out “sculpt a body” part. That would’ve been easy. But guess what, there even is an easier way I found out! So I was working at KISD, providing help over Zoom and also had Blender running on the PC and sculpted Jesus’ head. I thought it looked cool but it’s been way too clean and would’ve not got decimated as good as the other head. And it was this moment, right before closing the file and throw it into the trash and delete it into infinity, I hit S on my keyboard and scaled the had in Z axis. THAT LOOKS LIKE AN ARM! Yep, I took the head, scaled it a few times and placed it around. Arms, legs, belly, back, cheeks. Done. Looks perfect. Nothing is connected. Looks so humanoid but it’s so weird. What is keeping this guy together? I don’t know but I love it.  

FAKE
PEOPLE

This video was created with the topic of “Neural Creation” in mind. Every single person in this video is not a real person and was created by Nvidias’ GAN (generative adversarial network) at  thispersondoesnotexist.

    The Idea of the video is that the creation isn’t perfect at the beginning and has glitches and is not perfectly convincing. The more time passes the clearer and better the generated imagees become, thus more convincing. In this context the music also starts to be reversed at some point and creates an uneasy feeling to emphesize the fear of such a technology.

WARP
& VORTEX

These animations were created as a part of an assignment in which we had to talk about our personal WOW moment regarding cgi, animation and motion pictures. It’s an homage to the Vortex travel animation of the Stargate franchise and has received a personal touch when it comes to colours.

TAKE OFF
LOOP

In preperation for guest lecturer Dirk Koy, we had to create a looping GIF. I decided to created a looping rocket launch on a weird alien planet. The colour scheme and animations were mostly inspired by the game “No Man’s Sky”