OK GO remains one of the most innovative music groups in the world, both in the music they produce and in the music videos they create. Their newest offering is impulse Purchase, and I wish the title told you very much about the song itself, but it apparently doesn’t. That doesn’t mean it isn’t astonishing, it is. It’s fascinating, mysterious, wild, but inscrutable.
Designer/artist Lucas Zanotto and animator/filmmaker Will Anderson co-direct this latest OK Go music video/art piece, a Blender Studio open project using facial capture to drive Zanotto’s character designs in real-time.
From Blender:
“One of the goals of the production was to build a highly interactive, viewport-centric setup, so the video could be recorded in one take.
“By adding the music as a sound strip in the VSE, keyframing strategic set pieces, shaders, and node setups, we built a solid scaffolding to record the live facial performance. The setup uses straightforward shaders and simple shapes to achieve 30fps playback when using [Blender’s real-time render engine] EEVEE.
“One of the goals of the production was to build a highly interactive, viewport-centric setup, so the video could be recorded in one take.”
“The main character is built following Lucas Zanotto’s design language. The shapes, the overall proportions and color palette are driven by a set of bones, which in turn controls Geometry Nodes setups. This allows the creation of thousands of potential variants for the character.
“Simulation nodes play a big role as they are used to spawn bubbles, scene elements, handle jiggling limbs, and also the dynamic positioning of the camera towards the character.
“To achieve an entertaining facial performance, we choose to use live motion capture rather than keyframe animation. By developing a bespoke add-on, we enabled the integration of Live Link Face (a free facial motion capture app) with Blender to drive parts of the procedural character setup.”
Apart from being amazingly good, there’s a lot more going on here than you might realize.
For one thing, the entire video is animated in Blender, the 3d animation program that’s been taking the world by storm. The little singing avatar characters are live-animated based on camera capture, in real time. It’s called Live Puppeteering, and on the Blender web site, you can download the demo files and the Blender plugin that makes it work, and play with it yourself! You can even get the original Blender scene files used to create the music video.
Blender made the plugin to work with a free facial motion capture app called Live Link Face.
Everything OK GO does is amazing, but this might be the first time we, the public, have ever gotten to play with the very things they built to make one of these videos.
I hope you have fun with this. I can’t wait to try the technology out for myself.
