Radiolarians
A short animation inspired by the drawings of Ernst Haeckel
A short ambient movie with inspiration from the drawings of radiolarians by Ernst Haeckel. Nature never fails as an amazing source of inspiration. The movie above is the first iteration on the that project, a few quick test renders of different models, to get a sense of the images I could produce.
INSPIRATION Haeckel was a German biologist from nineteenth-century most famous for his work and drawings on radiolarians, a group of single-celled zooplankton, with beautiful and intricate mineral skeletons. They are found throughout the ocean, and their skeletal remains cover large portions of the ocean bottom. With their extensive variations of interesting symmetrical shapes I saw these organisms as a great modeling challenge, that could possibly produce some really nice images. CREATING THE MOVIE The basic topological modeling was created in TopMod. A great piece of open source software, perfect for this type of geometric/organic modeling. Final modeling, texturing, animation and rendering was done i Maya. Compositing was done i AfterEffects. The music in the film is Glacier by Supersole. Available at Opsound, the track is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Hence the movie is released under the same license.