Mograph Mondays

animations and designs for the Metro Detroit meetup

Mograph Mondays is a meet up for artists and animators that started in the Metro Detroit area; discussing the industry, latest news, and sharing tutorials and ideas. Each month, a member of the community creates a banner to be used as the promo image for the event. I've worked on a number of these, and below are some of my favourites.

November 2015

Using timelapses taken over the prior 6 months in Royal Oak, Michigan with a Samsung NX500 and the LensBaby Pro, I developed a digital, fractured style that was carried through the triangulation effects, animated lines, and typographic treatments. The triangle pixelation system itself was created using custom CIfilter code in Quartz Composer, implemented as an After Effects filter using FxFactory Pro.

September 2016

Using SpeedTree to model and animate a collection of trees that followed the geometry of the Mograph Mondays logo, I rendered everything in Lightwave using RGB encoding to combine three light passes into a single layer image output. Lighting brightness, colouration, effects, and playback speed were then animated in After Effects using Trapcode Sound Keys and a number of other effects. Optical Flares and Magic Bullet Looks finished off the stylisation.

Because the lighting and texturing were based on greyscale passes with all of the colouration created in After Effects, the setup was perfect for easy variations and exploration. A series of desktop images were created using related colour schemes and lighting for use during and after the event.

March 2017

This render served as both the monthly banner image and the key image in a presentation on voxel modelling in 3D Coat. I demoed taking separate models from Lightwave into 3D Coat, converting them to volumes and merging, modelling details and distress, then meshing and taking the results back into Lightwave for rendering.

July 2017

Modelled using Kodon and the HTC Vive, this banner was another tech demo presentation I put together to demonstrate the possibilities of VR modelling techniques.

July 2018

This was an R&D project at Vectorform that I leveraged for a banner and presentation for the Mograph Monday group. Modelled, detailed, and animated in Lightwave 3D, with RGB encoded textures built in Photoshop, and finished with a custom refractive shader in ShaderForge. All lighting, atmospherics, and final grading effects were rendered entirely in Unity. Even as the render times bogged down with higher quality lighting and shadows, preventing the project from being truly realtime, Unity still rendered a sigificant amount of footage in a very short amount of time. This allowed me to treat it far more like a live action event than a CG render in the editing room. Instead of carefully storyboarding the action and prepping only the frames that were required, I was able to render various camera shots and edit them like a multi-cam shoot with full coverage.

December 2018

While a fun project in itself, this was also the first public demo of some custom image processing effects I'd been building in Quartz Composer and FxFactory, and released for beta testing within the Detroit Motion Graphics community.

January 2020

This marked my first real production in Blender, along with my first experience with Radeon ProRender. A pretty major learning experience, and a lot of fun, if somewhat exhusting for the nights and weekends I spent debugging issues! I adapted code from ShaderToy to generate procedural textures (a key component of the ice), custom plugins for post processing effects using FxFactory (my first time in the FxCore development environment), and even recorded my own foley effects (the ice is a combination of velcro and PVC, while the water is a large cutting mat being shaken).