Personality Pavilions for Soul
The personality pavilion project was especially fun not only because of the technique I developed but also I got to design the shapes that should represent abstract concepts such as insecurity, humour, excitement, and even self-absorption in visually compelling ways.
I was actually testing a way to create color gradients in 3d space as an atmosphere, but the accidentally generated shapes looked similar to the pavilion shapes that we wanted, so we decided to use this technique for the pavilions rather than the atmosphere.
The technique is essentially animating a 2D polygon grid with shifting hues and capturing the color (rgb) values in volume. You can think of it as a very long motion blur. We tried to name this technique as CTTTFS (Color Traveling Through Time Frozen in Space), but it was too long, and nobody (including me) remembered it.
The rgb colors were used as UVW coordinate values for the production models, so the color can be adjusted by the lighting artists in the shader. The U and V values came from the polygon mesh's UVs, and the W is normalized time.
I tried to use the UVW coordinate for additional displacement effects as volume texture, but the example shape and the color (random yellow that I picked without thinking much…) reminded people of a dish washing sponge, so it didn’t get approved.
I also made my rig to handle the animated pavilions, which involved generating distinct polygon grid animations for each individual frame.
Some pavilions, like the Funny Pavilion, required a little more than simple polygon grid animation.