It is always interesting when you take a diversion from concentrating on “visual effects” and go see what other people are doing with graphics technology. In many ways, the SIGGRAPH conference is a yearly fix of all things interesting, but you have to stop working to get there, and residing outside of the US doesn’t make it any easier. The alternative time-sucking solution, is web surfing.
Sometimes you come across something which really gives you a jolt. The work Robert Hodgin does is clever and beautiful:
Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.
He uses Processing, an open-source programming environment for graphics and audio. See their exhibition space for more examples of what can be done. Robert Hodgin has a bit of his stuff on that page too, and great explanations of how the software was used (Birds/Flocking).
I’ve become quite interested in procedural animation of late, and have been wondering what we can do with Massive (and a bit of time) to create some visualisations. We’ve done a bit of stuff on films using Massive to create things other than crowds (like traffic, pedestrians, etc); so another logical step would be to use it with some input data to drive different aspects of it… hmmm… music clip anyone? With the right input data, I am sure you could make something quite special.