Negative Space: Step into Mikhail Sedov and Vasily Filileev of Subframe’s ‘D-Compression’ Chamber of Ideas
Subframe Studio — the Visual Art and Motion Design collective discuss how they created their most recent ConceptDo piece ‘D-Compression’, with Creative Director Mikhail Sedov and Technical Director Vasily Filileev sharing how ‘dynamics solver’ was implemented to get their project just right:
When we were approached to be the latest studio to create a #ConceptDo D-Doodle — we immediately began looking around ourselves for inspiration as to what we could create.
Fortunately, ConceptD gives creative freedom, with no limitations so we were able to create what we wanted. For inspiration, as often is the case, we explored our surroundings. The world of natural physics can provide so many ideas for artists. We explore a lot of research and development in random physics simulations, and see if anything catches our eye. This is exactly how we struck upon the idea for what become ‘D-Compression’.
We wanted to explore inflated soft body interactions. To achieve this, we created balls with cozy textures and made them move towards the center of the piece, where they would collide with one another and bounce around. From this clash of the soft textured titans, we attempted to build a ‘D’ shape within the negative space — a letter which you cannot see by staring directly at the animation, but which reveals itself in the dark matter.
This is because we wanted to create something which invites the viewer in; in the same way our abstract shapes are drawn into the center of the piece, we want our audience be drawn into the heart of our work, to try and fathom exactly what they are seeing.
To do this effectively, we had to implement a technique known as ‘dynamics solver’, allowing us to create smooth transitions between the hard and soft bodied textures in our 3D piece. This required heavy rendering and powerful software to run on equally capable hardware. As a result, the creative process was hard going, as we needed to perfect all of this, while maintaining our central concept of attraction via the subtlety of negative space.
These issues are always common when trying to simulate real life physics — it is always extremely demanding. We had challenges to handle the sheer number of soft bodies at the same time — it required a number of the iterations before we got a result we like.
Eventually though, after a lot of work, we did get to a place where we were satisfied with our #ConceptDo piece. We hope that it realizes our aim of embracing the viewer, enveloping them in the supple forms we rendered.
