Lasers, Lights, and Music

AHD Tribute - Future Retro - Early Access

Goes live on Saturday

Patreon Update - 3/20/2025

Greetings!

We know it's been a while since we've made an official Patreon update, and we do apologize for that. We've felt that we haven't had anything too major to write about. However, March and I have been sharing screenshots and videos of little things we've been working on, such as MIDAS development and models on our Discord server. If you haven't already joined it, I'd highly recommend it if you want to see more regular work from us.

That being said, we are officially beginning the rendering process for "Future Retro" in our ANIMUSIC HD TRIBUTE series. It's taken us a while (nearly 5 years at this point, but who's counting?), but we're at the final stretch with this monster of an animation. We can't give an exact estimate yet of when to expect it completed, but as promised you all will be the first to see it before anyone else does.

After we're completely done with Future Retro, we will resume work on our next original animation with the working title "Rails"

We want to thank you again for your patience and loyal patronage. Expect to see Future Retro in the very near future.

• Zach Goertzen 

  

General Update - 8/3/2024

Hello,

Next Animation

We are currently working on our next animation, currently named "Rails". The main concept behind this animation are individual instrument notes and/or instrument "triggers" fixed to vertical rails where the instrument "players" and/or instruments are traveling on separate vertical rails. Hence the current working title of "Rails".

We're being very methodical in our approach to this animation because there's a lot that needs to be tested before anything major gets worked on. Ambient Glow's music was completely written and produced before the visualization was conceived and Full Circle was written near the end of the modelling and rigging stages. The music for Rails will need to be written along side the production of the visuals. Writing the music hasn't begun yet, but we have a good idea of the vibe of the music and its genre.

So far we only have the percussion elements roughly 75% of the way done in terms of modelling and rigging. We've had to redo them a few times to make sure they can even be usable. Again we're trying to be very methodical to ensure there won't be too much to reconfigure when we really get into the testing stages.

We've actually had this idea as long as we've been working on animations together. We kept delaying it because we weren't confident we could tackle something of the scale we're aiming for with Rails, but we think we can do it now with the new and improved MIDAS.

High-Quality Videos for Patreons

We've decided to offer the high-quality .mp4's for Patreon supporters. Just send us a message on Patreon, and we'll add your registered email to a Google Drive repository. In the future, this process will be automated.

"Full Circle" - Drum Camera - Early Access

We meant to get this out sooner, but some annoying rendering issues delayed us. We'll put this out publicly on Wednesday.

Quick Update

Hello all, we are sorry for the lack of updates recently. We took an extended break due to burnout, personal issues, etc... Zach is back to work on modelling Mushroom Crisis, and I am working on MIDAS V3 while he's modelling. We just wanted to give a quick update that we're back at it, and we'll probably have some stuff to show in the next few weeks.

 - March

May 5th, 2024 Update

Hello, just want to give a brief update on what we're up to:

Full Circle

We did not anticipate Full Circle blowing up in the way that it did; we quadrupled our subscriber count, gained 60,000 views, and finally became eligible to join the YouTube Partner Program. We also gained a significant amount of new patrons (welcome, by the way). Thank you all for pledging your support!

We plan to release some bonus content for Full Circle; we already have most of the frames rendered for a drum-only camera; just need to re-render a few frames that didn't play nice while rendering. We also want to create a set construction style video. No ETA on when we'll put those out right now.

MIDAS

I'm currently in the process of completely revamping the entire music animation engine (aka MIDAS). For years now I've been putting off a third version of the software; with Full Circle's popularity and not very many active projects relying on V2 anymore, I've finally decided it's time.

The goals of the third version are:

• Separation from Blender: Not to say we'll be switching any time soon, but in the case that we do end up switching to some other software, that's now an option for us. V3 is now its own executable separate from Blender, and sends data via inter-process communication to Blender. This data can be interpreted by any software that implements some kind of plugin capabilities, so if we wanted to switch, all we'd need to do is write a plugin for reading the data and converting it to that softwares keyframe structure.

• Clean the Codebase: V2 is a mess of random experiments and bad decisions from the last four years. I've basically never removed anything to keep full compatibility with scripts since August of 2020; so a massive restructure has been needed for a while now.

• Different Scripting Language: I am not really a big fan of Python. I like Lua a lot more as a scripting language, and C# as a programming language. V3 implements a slightly custom subset of Lua as the scripting language (only a few changes, such as single-statement conditionals, string interpretation, etc), with the ability to use objects from the C# layer very easily. I've made it so it's stupid easy to expose functionality to the Lua layer as well, which was something I was scared I wouldn't be able to make work as smoothly.

What's Next

Zach right now is in the process of creating the next animation, which right now is named "Mushroom Crisis" (subject to change). V3 is being tested on Mushroom Crisis as well. All art here is VERY work-in-progress, and doesn't reflect anything final.

 - March

Full Circle - Render Development Stills - Early Access

Full Circle - Early Access

We'll be releasing the video publicly on Saturday

Patreon Update

Hello, we want to give a small update:

Zach is currently on vacation and will be back soon. When he's back in a few days, we plan to begin rendering Full Circle. We only have a couple things left to adjust.

Our plans after that are to start a new animation project from scratch and focus solely on that rather than a combination of things at the same time. We want to see how quickly we could finish a project from the start to the finish line.

Full Circle Progress Update #3

We've been working on polishing the fine details of Full Circle for the last month. A lot of the hard work is out of the way; most instruments have gone through a final check to make sure everything works and looks correct. The only exceptions are the vibes and the guitar, which still need work done. The guitar has barely anything done on it; it's been a very hard instrument to get right, and we eventually decided to just finish everything before the guitar, then focus all our attention towards that.

So now, the final things to do are:

- Finalize the vibraphone animation

- Complete the guitar

- Fix a couple minor hiccups animation wise

- Finalize the camera angles

- Finish mixing & mastering

- Rendering

There is no guarantee for a release date, but it will likely be within the next month.

Early Access - Pipe Dream Single Shot

We'll put this up publicly on Saturday.

Hook/Full Circle Progress Update #2

The music composition for the animation, now named "Full Circle," has finished, and camera work has begun. The music is now entering the mixing process but won't be complete until cameras are finalized for animated panning and volume. We've done some cosmetic redesigns to a few instruments as well as completely rework certain aspects of others, primarily in the interest of making the instruments look satisfying/interesting to watch. 

All instruments have a base level of animation that needs tuning and refining. We're currently aiming to release the final animation sometime early March, although no guarantees.

Hook Progress Update

For the last few months, we've been on and off working on an original project (currently named "Hook", subject to change). Most of the visual work is done (modelling, lighting, shading, etc...), and the music is almost done, so for the most part, we're just in animation mode right now.

Most of the instruments are relatively simple to get working, we've mostly been trying to figure out how to animate the bass and guitar. The biggest issue with that is trying to split the notes properly between three different aspects; the fret fingers, the strings, and the plucking fingers/pick. It's not easy to balance them out right now without a lot of manual tuning, but we have gotten somewhere with it for the bass. For the ANIMUSIC tribute (and even Ambient Glow), a lot of that work was done manually (we would split the notes up into individual tracks), but we really want to avoid having to do that kind of manual work for our original projects. As far as the guitar goes, we're getting somewhere, just slowly. A lot of this is territory we haven't approached yet, so it is taking a bit more time.

Drums have also been difficult, as we've been meticulously adjusting them throughout the entire development process. A lot of it just comes down to getting these complexly-designed moving parts to have satisfying hit motions, especially on faster note patterns. The hi-hat has been particularly annoying to deal with, but we've been saving fixing that for the end while we focus on the sticks that are used more than once (the tom/snare and cymbal sticks).

No real updates on the ANIMUSIC HD Tribute right now, we've mostly suspended our work on that for the sake of finishing our original animation. After we're done with Hook, we'll get back to that. Aqua Harp will definitely be the next one we put out, but after that, we don't know what we're going to next. Out of the three remaining, Future Retro probably has the most work done on it animation wise, but it's more than likely that most of that will have to be re-coded. We'd like to save Harmonic Voltage for last.

Three animation test videos are attached below: