Art Impact Analysis, 2015. HD Computer Generated Animation.
For this project, I collaborated with Altair, specialists in Finite Element Analysis (FEA), an advanced method for analysing structural, thermal, electrical and dynamic processes. Altair's specialist engineers use proprietary software and predominantly cater for the aerospace, engineering and automotive industries. FEA can reliably model the effect of real-world physical impacts and is used by car manufacturers to rigorously test the structural properties of their vehicles.
Using Autodesk Maya, I modelled the work of three seminal 20th century sculptors: Richard Serra, Henry Moore and Anthony Caro. I sent these models to Altair, who ran the impact simulations over hundreds of hours. Each impact lasted only a few seconds but because every mechanical component in the vehicle must be accounted for, the output amounted to almost 100GB of STL files. I converted this dataset into OBJ sequences, and compiled those into unified Alembic caches in SideFX Houdini. These caches were then imported into Autodesk Maya, cleaned up, retimed and rendered using Chaosgroup's Vray render engine.
