The class was tasked with making a work of art that evokes a sense of calm, peacefulness, and renewal. The work may be originally created in a physical form (painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, etc) or digital form (still image or animation) but will ultimately have to be digitized (photographed or scanned) and fit into the circular template provided.

I started this project with a very clear vision in mind of wanting to do something with stars fading into darkness. I remember seeing these stars in a bouncy ball I had as a kid and there was something calming about the random nature of the stars and the material they're made of is very shiny so I tried to make a similar thing in Blender. I was also inspired by the designs on shadertoy.com because of their code medium.

My process was to create a particle system and repeat a plane masked with the shape of my star, with a normal map that I made in photoshop to simulate glitter. I had a camera pointing straight up at the sky to record a dome randomly spawning my stars and over a few frames they would move into a black fog I set up a little bit outside of the dome. This looked okay but lacked the visual depth I thought would be there. I wanted my animation to loop as well and it was very hard to do so with this method, and there was a weird dark section that I could not get rid of. I believe this is because the stars were planes which only have positive normal in one direction.

In my final work, I created a volume that could spawn stars with random location, size, and rotation that were now three dimensionally modeled so that they don't have issues with their normals. I created a big plane that could randomly spawn some area lights to illuminate the stars. I then parented the lights to the camera and set the camera to move to the right over fifteen hundred frames. Over three days my laptop rendered each frame and they each took about two and a half minutes to calculate. I put it all together in Adobe After Effects and rendered it a couple times because I didn't realize the bitrate was limiting the animation in the final video. Video Properties: 30 seconds, 1500 frames, 60 fps, 4096px x 4096px.