?! - Lungskull Music Visualizer

!? - Lungskull is a popular underground song from 2020. It has a hyper beat and a chaotic vibe. I used to listen to this song on blast with my friends while we sped past city lights on the highway. I wanted to lean into this experience, and embody the music with imagery. I worked with Flora Yang to accomplish the visualizer you see above. We wanted to show the feeling of the song outside and inside our bodies. This is why you start in an urban environment; then realize you are actually a vessel in the bloodstream, pumping blood through the body.

Rigging & Physics

The main rig for this project was the car. Instead of using a traditional vehicle rig controlling the wheels, chassis steering wheel and body, I created an animation for the wheels, which runs inside the vehicle group. In other words, the wheels spinning are a child to the vehicle as a whole, so that they move together.

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Lighting

For this project, I wanted to create all the assets myself, so we did not use any pre existing models or textures. A lot of the textures are quite simple as far as the build of nodes except for one. I wanted to add a sense of uniqueness to the vehicle, so I created a fake water simulation to use as a glass texture. For the background, I simply used a textured image that felt like the inside of a heart.

The lighting consists of a few things. One source is the dome light, another are carefully placed area lights, and then a spotlight drives the narrative of a police helicopter looking for the car which is on the run. The lights are designed to make the world feel cohesive, and dark.

Modeling

After deciding that this piece would include a car, I started modeling it first. I wanted to get better at modeling from scratch, which is why I didn’t bring any pre-made assets. The reference images are the front and side view of an older Nissan 180 SX - Type X. Almost the whole vehicle is one piece of geometry apart from the lights, wheels steering wheel, windows and license plate.

The building are a very simple structure, and then cloned. I then added a sound field to affect the size to the music.

Test Render

To the left is a test render of an early iteration of lighting, landscape, and modeling to capture the vibe. Car model, smooth textured ground, buildings with glass windows, and a relaxing purple dusk
sky HDRI.

Caption Design

Often times lyric videos have very generic text, and I didn’t want recreate what’s already been seen. How can I integrate the lyrics as part of the piece? I first wrote out every 1–3 words in a seperate after effects layer. Then I animated one of them, copy and then I pasted that animation to all of the other layers. After all the text was animated, I added some effects to make it fit the vibe.

Typeface:
Amador—Blackletter Font