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Robcat spotted this movie on my YouTube channel and suggested I post it to the Forum. The movie is composited from two clips made in A:M. First clip (the color pattern): Years ago I made light boxes using Xmas lights on posts that supported cylinders with cutout patterns; the tops of the cylinders were vaned so heat rising from the lights drove the rotation of the cylinders. The light patterns were projected onto a sheet of translucent plastic. Recently I got to thinking about light boxes and wondered if I could simulate the mechanism in A:M. After some trial and error — that being trying to find a method for doing the cutouts without actually modeling each hole and discovering that while a cookie cutter map would perforate the cylinders, light would not pass through and appear on the projection screen; perhaps someone knows why? — I modeled the cylinders using the brute-force method, lots of CPs and splines. The choreography is simple. Two cylinders, one within the other rotating in opposite directions, with red, blue, and green lights inside the cylinders, and a screen to receive the projected lights. I set the rotation speeds for the cylinders so that it takes more than 10 minutes before the exact same pattern repeats. Here are birds-eye view captures from A:M showing a wire-frame of the cho set-up, a render of the set-up, and a frame from the resulting movie: While the colors and patterns are pretty and the simulation is quite representative of the light boxes I used to make, I wondered if I could get something more visually interesting. Second clip (the black and white pattern): I decided to experiment with sprites. I made a simple white square and modeled an emitter to spin the sprites outward. The result was a little too clumpy. I put a black edge on the white square and got a much more interesting look. Rendered with Alpha channel = Off. Here is a frame: I edited the final movie in DaVinci Resolve with the sprite clip on top of the color clip and Composite mode set to Multiply. Here is a frame from the movie: The soundtrack is a generative music composition I made in LogicPro. The piece uses standard orchestral instruments with some effects processing — reverb, delay, etc. — and a quasi-12 tone compositional approach. Each chord in the piece is made up of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, or in some cases 2 and even 3 octaves of notes. A Probability Gate is applied to each note of each chord in each instrument track to determine whether or not a particular note will sound. With a sufficiently low probability value, the likelihood of hearing the same music twice is vanishingly small. The movie is intended to give a pleasant audio-visual experience inducing a feeling of stasis, motion without progress, evolution without advancement, calmness, trance, even a semi-visionary state of consciousness. Or boredom, perhaps. Here is the YouTube link to "Prismatic Fracture": https://youtu.be/Em6VyzsNcgc Best to all, Joseph

Also... Unless you've just emerged from underneath a rock which was underneath yet another rock you are already familiar with "The Animator's Survival Kit" by Richard Williams. It is full of essential nuts and bolts character animation advice although I have noticed computer animators seem to have trouble transferring its lessons to 3D CG workflow. There are many cheap used copies out there but it is hard to know if they are selling the 1st edition or the expanded edition. "The Disney Villain" by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston is not a landmark of animation literature like their "Illusion of Life" was but it gives their insider appraisal of just about every bad guy (turns out, they are not all women and cats) ever to appear in Disney animation, mostly with a "what went wrong" analysis. These are available cheaply used.

Hi Everyone, Here is a screen shot of my newest model I'm working on... Mark Day