The goal here was to create a visually pleasing music video for the first song on the new album Repetitive Beats EP by Lawrenco.
The basic idea of the video went through many iterations before the theme of the exhibition in the mystic forest was chosen. I like to divide the video into three parts. The intro, the destruction part (starts when the first stone hits the glass) and the Elton John part with the sunglasses.
The intro part sets the mood for the music video und explains the situation a little bit. I really like the POV-camera of the stones with the chromatic aberration and the fisheye lens. I used Octane’s Universal Camera for the fisheye effect and because Octane doesn’t have a Chromatic Aberration effect in its camera tag I used a “physical” lens in front of the camera with a glass material and a little bit of dispersion.
The destruction part was the most time consuming part of the video. I used Houdini’s RBD Material Fracture for the glass destruction. I had a few problems with getting the UVs of the shattered glass to work properly, but after a little bit of trial and error I got the hang of it.
For the destruction part my PC rendered about twelve days constantly even though I had the power of an NVIDIA RTX 3090 Graphics Card, but with all the trees and plants I had about 10 million polygons in the scene and the volumetrtic fog also raised the rendertime by about 1 minute per frame. Which averaged a rendertime per frame of about 3 1/2 minutes.
The Elton John part was very straight forward, I just used a plane with an Image Sequence of Lawrenco in front of the glasses to get the reflection of him dancing.
After the twelve days of rendering it was time to cut the video. Turns out, I had not enough frames for the 3 minute song. I didn’t have enough time to let it render again for that many days, as the deadline was fastly approaching and I had an upcoming operation, where I couldn’t be in front of my PC for a longer period. So I used the power of my RTX 3090 and AI again and used the FlowFrame app for AI video Interpolation. I doubled the frames of the whole destruction part in about 10 minutes and was stunned by the end results. You can’t really tell, that half of the frames aren’t really there. So I really have to say, that the MVP of this project was the RTX 3090, without that card, the whole project wouldn’t have been possible to create let alone finish.
Raphael Heiser / March 2021