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I decided to develop my modeling and compositing skills with a brief spare time project: A short ambient movie with inspiration from the drawings of radiolarians by Ernst Haeckel. Nature never fails as an amazing source of inspiration. The movie above is the first iteration on the that project, a few quick test renders of different models, to get a sense of the images I could produce.

Inspiration

Haeckel was a German biologist from nineteenth-century most famous for his work and drawings on radiolarians, a group of single-celled zooplankton, with beautiful and intricate mineral skeletons. They are found throughout the ocean, and their skeletal remains cover large portions of the ocean bottom. With their extensive variations of interesting symmetrical shapes I saw these  organisms as a great modeling challenge, that could possibly produce some really nice images.

Illustrations from "Radiolaria" (1887) by Ernst Haeckel

Creating the movie

The basic topological modeling was created in TopMod. A great piece of open source software, perfect for this type of geometric/organic modeling.

Modeling in TopMod

Selection of models in TopMod

Final modeling, texturing, animation and rendering was done i Maya. Compositing was done i AfterEffects.

The music in the film is Glacier by Supersole. Available at Opsound, the track is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Hence the movie is released under the same license.

Whats next

Future developments on the project will focus on more variations in models, color variations, light, particles and radical experiments on the final look of the film.