Animating Paintings

You can download the completed project for Windows and Mac here!  Use your mouse to look and the WSAD / Arrow keys to move.  Use Command+Q on Mac or Alt+F4 on Windows to Quit.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B0sKA3bz1J1ddjE0WU83ZTVVTlk

Statement

The essential goal of this project is to translate the works of artist Bridget Riley into a digital and three-dimensional form, to be viewed in a sort of virtual museum.  Ideally, the experience would be viewed in Virtual Reality, as VR gives a sense of scale and presence not possible through a traditional monitor.  However a VR implementation is beyond the scope of this project.  In my "looking out" assignment I was quite successful in realizing the implied movement of Bridget Riley's "Fall."  The animated and fully procedural nature of the piece has an incredible impact on the viewer due to its complex optical effects.  In addition to including "Fall" into my museum, I included three more interpretations of Riley's "Movement in Squares," "Untitled (Fragment 3)" and "Untitled (Fragment 1)."  The three additions are not only animated (like "Fall") but have also been reinterpreted into 3D.

Context

Bridget Riley is a painter mostly known for her contributions to Op-Art.  While she is still alive and active today, Riley is famous for her work in the mid 1960s.  Op-Art (short for Optical Art) is an artistic genre characterized by the use of optical illusions.  These optical illusions attempt to trick the viewer into perceiving depth, movement, or color.  Riley's works are particularly known for their ability to cause feelings of seasickness and dizziness in some cases.  One of the goals of this project was to translate the implied depth and movement from her paintings into a more literal motion that is possible in a virtual world.  Because of this, much attention was paid towards the message that Riley tried to give off with the piece.  For example, I interpreted Riley's "Fall" as a flowing waterfall in motion, and this interpretation carried over to the final piece.  In the case of "Movement in Squares" the implied depth was rather obvious - the challenge there was to faithfully recreate the effect using 3D software.

Process

I primarily used two pieces of software throughout the development of this project: the Unity game engine and Blender, a 3D modelling suite.  My implementation of "Fall" was comparatively trivial, as it is a direct port from my looking out assignment.  For more information on the process of creating "Fall," see the Looking Out project page.  As for the other three pieces ("Movement in Squares," "Untitled (Fragment 3)" and "Untitled (Fragment 1).") the creative process began by looking at the piece and attempting to deconstruct what the abstract shapes on Riley's canvas were trying to represent.  For example, here is a picture of a deconstruction-in-progress of "Untitled (Fragment 3)" in Blender:

In this case, I used bezier curves to trace the curves in the middle of the piece.  I used Blender's "Knife Project" tool to cut these curves into a striped cylinder, and offset the cuts downward to create the cascading effect you see in the final piece.  The result of this is the mesh shown below:

Almost there!  I then rotated all of the vertical bits on the mesh to stretch the stripe texture like so:

Compare this to the actual piece, and I think I got pretty close:

The final step was to bring it into unity and animate it.  I have some in-motion gifs of the game in the "Product" section, but below I show a view of the Unity editor, where I tweaked these animation keyframes.

Product

I believe the project itself is best described in motion.  Below I show some gifs of the final product.

"Fall"

"Movement in Squares"

"Untitled (Fragment 1)"

"Untitled (Fragment 3)"

Critique

I believe my work was quite successful in its primary original goals: It successfully translated two dimensional implied depth / movement into a 3 dimensional context.  However, there are a few things that I would do differently if I have to work on this project again.  Firstly, I would try to highlight the differences between digital and analog media.  This is implied by the aliasing / pixellation present in "Fall" (this is more obvious when playing the game - there are noticeable jagged edges in the smooth curves of the piece).  However I would have liked to bring this contrast to the forefront more.  This can also be viewed from the opposite direction: digital content creation is incredibly easy compared to its analog counterpart.  What took Riley (or her understudies) weeks to paint takes me mere seconds to create and render.  In either case, this disparity should ideally have been highlighted more effectively.

Personal Reflection

I am quite proud of how this project turned out.  If I had more time, I would have created even more pieces (each one took anywhere from 1-3 hours to make, depending on the complexity of the piece).  However I don't view quality over quantity as a weakness of the project as a whole.  I learned a lot about how to deconstruct art into its essential elements, and to construct 3D forms out of 2D abstractions (lines, shapes, etc).  As mentioned, I would have liked to highlight some of the differences between analog and digital media in the piece.  With this in mind if I did the project over again I would have added in a component to highlight this in some way (adding a counter for the lines of code it took to make the piece digitally, for example, is an interesting idea that I feel would accomplish this nicely).