Fabian Aerts's profile1MD | One Million Dollars's profile

HxGN | Bridging The Divide

Motion Graphics
After Effects

THE PITCH
Hexagon Geospatial is a US company specializing in geolocation and working for many huge brands such as NASA and Airbus. I've been lucky enough to be chosen to work on the opening title of their yearly major keynote event. The film has been projected in 5K in Las Vegas in June 2018, on a giant 100m2 screen.


THE CONCEPT
In the geolocation industry, dots are everywhere. They are the starting point for every single shape. I wanted to push the idea further and explore the possibilities of building entire scenes solely around those dots.


THE TEASER 
During the first phase of the project I made a lot of R&D to validate the feasibility of the core idea. Compiling some of the results from this research, I created this short teaser.


THE EVENT
The movie was projected during the "HxGN LIVE Las Vegas 2018" event, Hexagon's annual cross-industry technology conference. It was used as the kick-off to Mladen's Stojic's — Hexagon Geospatial CEO — keynote speech.


BEHIND THE SCENE
I used very low poly meshes to be able to get all those elements animated directly in my cinema 4d viewport. I then used Octane to scatter millions of mini emissive spheres all over the meshes and used X-Particles to make the animated ones.

In the beginning I just wanted to get the dots without any black shape support but I faced a serious challenge during the animation process : seeing through the different objects proved to be a real problem. People's eyes and brains react really weirdly when they can't understand the depth of a scene. It's usually not such an issue on still images, because you have the time to analyze the scene. But when you have quick camera movements around animated objects, it becomes total madness.



SOME OF THE EARLY STUDIES, ABANDONED IDEAS 
AND INITIAL GRAPHIC RESEARCHES


HxGN | Bridging The Divide
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