London-based directing collective, Mini Vegas, not only works on animation projects; they also do computer programming and run their own art gallery. To bring all this together, they took the programming experience they gained from working on experimental projects, such as advanced beauty, combined it with their design and animation skills and forged it into a real-time virtual version of a physical gallery space.
In this installation-like piece, the user can interact with sound driven sculptures of several forms. There are old friends like metaballs, particle systems, simulations and more. Those generative 3D elements make up the nice, rainbow-coloured, neo-futuristic shapes we all love so much.
This is all based on a custom made software architecture with quite some nice technical specs such as 60fps playback, dualcore, GPU based, OpenGL and FFT to drive the graphics from the audio — all the nerdy acronyms you want.
With computer hardware becoming increasingly faster, the final conclusion would be to completely scrap the traditional workflow of rendering in passes and just do everything in real time. Computer games already go that route, with impressing results. It will be very interesting to see this technology merging into the animation sector.