VJ/visuals
I have been experimenting with Unreal Engine's material system with the goal of creating sound-reactive visualisers for live events. The idea is to use procedural materials in combination with 3D objects that react to sound picked up by a microphone in real time. It gets rendered in UE5 and is sent to a video mapping program such as HeavyM which enables to project the images into different surfaces and add various post-processing effects.
I started by creating different greyscale shaders which could later be mixed in various ways and that have parameters that could be driven by sound.
I added some 3D elements and turned it into a flower motif for an event organised in a plant shop. The rotation and scale of the petals and the color mix of the procedural texture react to the loudness of low frequency sound picked up by a microphone. Because it can be mapped to surfaces at any angle, I added the option to manually rotate the whole scene to better visually align the viewing angle for the audience.
Subsequently I would like to develop many different scenes with various degrees of procedural content that have various manual controls for the VJ for customisation. Definitely the interplay between light and shadow using 3D objects is a great way of making illusions of space on flat surfaces in the real world, I would like to explore that in a much deeper level.