The schedule would be tight, the technical hurdles daunting and the creative demands high, but it was obvious to every person in the room that this project would establish a new understanding of what is possible with this next-generation web technology, and also continue to evolve the traditional music video format.

Harnessing Chris Milk's vision would require a diverse team working in very close coordination. Mirada was tasked with setting the look and feel for the overall experience, as well as creating all of the animals and other assets that would populate its different environments, and developing the technical approach to their behaviors in this very new platform and world. The design and technical development teams would have to work in parallel through this project's numerous hurdles; the creative informed the technical decisions, the technical requirements re-informed the design process. This process embodied artistic creativity cross-pollinating with technical ingenuity. Here is a peek 'behind the curtains' at Mirada's process on "3 Dreams of Black."

Following the anatomy of each animal, the polygons were tailored to this aesthetic so no animal was misrepresented. Finally, all of the polygons were digitally hand-painted in the concept phase of production, giving everything a handmade quality. We worked diligently to leverage the limitations as an asset and not a liability.

Attention quickly turned to designing the 50 'good' and 'evil' creatures that composed the different "soups" of animals, and applying the rules established earlier in the design phase. Concurrently, the designers started working closely with the 3D team to create and model the elements simultaneously while consistently striving to attain the desired look with the mandate for real time user control over their animation.

The design team was also heavily involved in the creative decisions that drove the extremely technical behaviors of the 'animal soups' that follow the viewer's mouse through the experience. Chris Milk and the Mirada designers had a specific visual language for each soup; the 'Life Soup' was meant to be more graceful and fluid as it infuses the city with bright color, whereas 'the Black Soup' was meant to be aggressive and attack everything that it came in contact with. The concept art included multiple explorations of how these soups would look and move through the world, and how they would morph and change into each other. This artwork not only provided a visual goal for the 3D artists to aim for, it also helped to generate ideas for additional soup elements.

for the animals and environments, creating assets to attain the correct feel and constantly revising concepts to help the 3D and code teams solve technical limitations and maintain visual continuity. From painting on top of screen captures of 'work in progress' 3D assets to advising coders on the most ideal shader settings, the design team remained hands-on to bring Chris Milk's ambitious vision to life.

Despite their stylized polygonal design, each one was animated to have as close to a realistic gait as possible. CG Supervisor Danny Zobrist pushed the modeling, rigging and animation teams to attain movements that were smooth and had the correct amount of weight and personality to capture the essence of each animal despite the extremely low-resolution geometry. Many of the final animations required multiple revisions of geometry and rigging to remove any artifacts created by the low poly count of each animal.

To complicate the challenges inherent to real time computer graphics, one of the creative requests for the animals was that they be able to morph into one another as much as possible. In order to do this, each animal had to be created from the same basic topology, requiring the same number of vertices arranged in the same order for each one. In order to avoid creating unnecessarily dense small animals, they were grouped into 'families' that would remain 'inter-morphable.'

Using these point caches allowed the rigging to be more complex, since the rigs did not need to be exported, only the final animations. This freed the Mirada team to use special tweaks to remove undesirable movements caused by the low resolution of the animal geometry, and it enabled complex morphs between animals in the real time environment. In order to determine the base colors for an animal, the modeling team selected groups of polygons and assigned them materials with colors derived from the concept art that were painted for them. In this manner the average color for each body part was established, over which ambient occlusion, environment and interactive lighting, shader properties such as reflectivity, and OGL post-processing effects were layered to achieve a final effect close to the concept art.

As the soup development progressed, there was a heavy focus on using simple, easily replicable techniques so that the behaviors being developed in Houdini could accurately be replicated in the final WebGL engine. This use of Houdini provided pre-visualization of the final behaviors while simultaneously proving out the techniques required to accomplish them.

Once each trigger was approved, its geometry had to be collapsed and hidden in the piece of the environment that it was designed to grow out of, like hidden jack-in-the-boxes for the viewer to release. The Black Soup triggers involved taking existing assets in the countryside environment and creating a 'destroyed' version that could be activated when that soup comes in contact with them. In order to properly visualize these triggers, and the manner in which they would animate, a trigger viewer was created in Houdini. Using this tool, it was possible to evaluate and refine the placement of the hidden state of each trigger to maximize the effect each one would have as it is activated.

In Conclusion

'3 Dreams of Black' was a tremendous experience and opportunity to express storytelling in a new emerging medium. This engaging project crosses boundaries whereby conceptual design meets interactivity head-on while embracing a groundbreaking new playground in WebGL. Mirada's team of designers, CG artists, technicians and programmers discovered intelligent solutions through collaboration and creative brainstorming that culminated in a playful, immersive new experience.