I don't really like screensavers. Especially mandatory
screensavers, when every employee is expected to have the same picture on their
'workstation' display, often enforced for nebulous reasons of security but
quite often in a covert (or overt) effort to crush any spark of individuality
still extant in a worker drone and replace it with company-approved banality.
But if I did the mandated screensaver would probably be our
company logo. Recently re-branded by my good friends in the design team our new
logo is bold and clean and while I could think of worse images to be on my
screen when I come back from lunch, as I said I still don’t really like company
screensavers. I suppose this was on my mind when I tried to make one that looks
like it is a normal static jpeg – something that IT would have remotely
installed on your machine to stop you having a picture of your kids or a
Bugatti there – until it suddenly explodes.
Here's how it works. The good thing about 3D programs, once
you have got over the million little hurdles made by all the annoying things
about 3D programs, is that you are in control of the physics in the little
world you create. When you start up a fresh scene in your program, in my case
C4D, you are presented with a Tron-like grid, stretching away to all horizons
into infinity. There is a simulation of real-world physics here: things are
affected by gravity, light bounces around to illuminate your world, there is
air, there is liquid, even fire. But the handy thing is you can turn these
things on and off at your will. If a light is casting an annoying shadow, you
can simply turn the shadow off while keeping the light. If something is too
bright you can invert the light so it only casts a shadow. This kind of
control over light is something a real-life photographer would pull an eyeball
out to achieve, and it doesn’t stop there. If your art director is concerned
the gizmo you have spent so long animating is spinning too fast or falling out
of shot you can increase the friction on its surface or make it immune to
gravity's pull. In short, you are a god, and if your real life is very sad you
can laugh maniacally as you spin things in your world into chaos and make all
the elements dance to your celestial whim.
The screensaver works on such an otherworldly and deliberate
conceit, namely shining coloured lights through glass objects but only showing
the refractions they produce, nothing else. You know the little lambent play of
light you get when you shine a light through a wine glass? Here's a picture
showing what I mean.
The refraction artifacts you get are called caustics, and
that is what makes the colours in the screensaver. Essentially I made a version
of the logo in glass and another in front of it in white. The background is a
big dark square, like a photographer's flag. It is set to only pick up the
caustics of the image, and also to wibble about gently like it's caught in the
breeze. The exploding part of the image is made by pushing a giant deformer
object through the logo: the logo wants to stay together but is shoved
violently apart like a cloud when a 747 makes an unexpected entrance.
I changed the colours and added the glitches in After
Effects - originally it was purple but that seemed a bit obvious.
I should mention that I am still very much a learner - be
wary of anyone who says they are an expert in 3D, unless they work for
Industrial Light and Magic - and I would have been very stuck with this and
every other project I have ever worked on if it hadn’t been for the C4D
community, in particular this time C4DCafe and helloLuxx.
If anyone at Purple would like to use the screensaver then
let me know, and if you work for another company and would really like to show
them who's boss by having another agency's logo as your screensaver then drop
me a line too, you crazy devil.
Richard Larden
Richard has worked for Purple for nearly 8 years, starting off in the production team with an exceptional eye for detail as our proofreader. Now Rich works in the digital artwork and production helping to create innovative and creative digital assets for our clients.
*Image credit: Jabuka96 on Deviant Art