Chris Jones String Theory

[OFF]

Cool work, but nothing about String Theory itself ))

[lardbros]

Wow that was very impressive. I would love to see a piece on this going into how it was made.

If his previous works are anything to go by, there will be a breakdown of this at some point.
He really went to town on the 'Passenger' making of stuff, which were as beautiful and awe-inspiring as the short film itself.

Awesome work Chris!

[erikals]

Cool work, but nothing about String Theory itself ))

myeah,,, tricky since string theory is quite vague, closer to a hypothesis

[lardbros]

Isn't it kind of a pun? There are planetary type bodies in there, but most of it based around musical strings... Hence the name I guess.
Either way, it's awesome work nonetheless!

[bazsa73]

As my favorite next door canadian hockey coach would say: Good job!

[Axis3d]

Super amazing work. Hitfilm is a compositing software (think of it as a free alternative to After Effects). Chris' lightwave work is always inspiring and truly imaginative.

[djwaterman]

It's not so much the tools, Blender was used also. It's just Chris is a genius, he uses low end tools and produces high end results.

[lardbros]

It's not so much the tools, Blender was used also. It's just Chris is a genius, he uses low end tools and produces high end results.

I'm interested to know his workflow for blender and LightWave... What did he do with what etc.

[XswampyX]

I'm interested to know his workflow for blender and LightWave... What did he do with what etc.

Who knows, but here's something you can play around with...

[erikals]

Mighty Cool!  

[MonroePoteet]

Brilliant! Here's my (hopefully correct but maybe not!) dissection of the scene / objects / images:

XswampyX Spectrum_2 scene / object Dissection:

1. Create a B&W image of the sound file's waveform, with white as the waveform's magnitude over time on a black background for the Luma channel below
   
   • Not sure what tool XswampyX used. Maybe open source SonicVisualizer?
   • Move / edit / clip the B&W waveform image file so it's at the bottom of the image (0.0 in Y)
2. Create a 2DTextures=>Image node with the B&W sound waveform mapped in the Y axis (pointing up) and rotated 90 degrees in H (going down the Z axis)
3. Move a Null in Z over the life of the audio file to "scan" the waveform image via the Image node's Position input
4. Use the Luma output of the B&W image as the per-position sound file intensity
5. The Luma output is used as a multiplier to displace (Surface Displacement in the node network) the top of the "Spectrum:Line" object via a Weight map "Move"
   
   • This produces the black moving solid waveform
6. The Luma output is used as the Offset for the small green boxes for Spectrum:Instance (scaled down to 0.1%)
   
   • The Instance_Array implements the Instancer on Spectrum:Instance
   • This produces the bright green dotted line

Using the same method, I wonder if the SonicVisualizer's Spectrograph output could be used to "zoom in" on a particular X position of the B&W audio file image's changing Z position (i.e. a particular frequency at that point in time). Might act as a "band pass filter" on the audio file, allowing some diverse manipulation of objects / channels based upon specific frequencies in the audio file per time slice rather than the overall magnitude of the sound. Hmmm....

Again: Brilliant!

mTp

[XswampyX]

Thanks. :-D

You are close with your dissection but...

The image on the plane is just a helper for finding the start/end of music spectrum. Once it's lined up then you could make it invisible as it's the texture image in the node that moves the objects.

The image file is the spectrum but with 256 bands. Here it is again with 32. It might look a bit more familiar.