FraKtus rants and fun videoz

One of the very cool consequences of being a visualist coder is that you come in contact with a lot of inspiring peoples. Sometimes you even get to meet people that you knew before starting your project and company. This is what happened with Michel Huygen, the soul of Neuronium.

I have always been attracted by electronic music that has it’s roots in the Berlin culture at the time when the city was a closed place. Neuronium music is following the heritage of this movement but with a unique touch that give the music his unique cosmic feeling.

I know Michel Huygen since a long time because he was an early user of ArKaos software many years ago. Not every musician has like him such visual sensibility.

Another inspiring person I got the chance to meet is Eric Wenger, the creator of many cool applications such as MetaSynth, ArtMatic, ArtMatic Voyager and many years ago the original creator of Bryce, the first 3D landscaping application.

ArtMatic is a software based on mathematical graphs defining textures or height maps that are then used by ArtMatic Voyager for the generation of landscapes. I was listening some Neuronium tracks a few months ago when I realized that the music matched very well with some of the ArtMatic worlds. At the same time I received a message of Michel Huygen informing me that he will come to Brussels to present some of his graphic works. and his latest cd’s I used that opportunity to start rendering a few loops and presented that to him during our meeting. Michel was very enthusiastic about this idea so I did push it to the end and here is the result.

You can see here the final version of the track “In Aliens I Trust” I decided to visualize, if you go to YouTube you can see it in 720p:

If you are curious to see the inner details of the landscape here is the height field of the landscape opened in ArtMatic:

ArtMatic Bio City 3B Interface

The rendering of each movie segment is then done in ArtMatic Voyager where you can define the camera movements and launch the renderings:

ArtMatic Voyager Bio City

All the segments took one month to render, for this work I used a MacMini that I have a home. I then assembled everything in Final Cut Express.

Hope you enjoyed the ride, the music is fantastic and the capacity of ArtMatic Voyager is just endless!