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.

“And it’s all one file! Download it, open it, and see how everything works.”
 
 

 
Artist: OK Go
Label: OK Go Publishing BMI

Production: Blender Studio
Director: ‪Lucas Zanotto‬, ‪Will Anderson
EP: Francesco Siddi, Damian Kulash
Character Designer: Lucas Zanotto
Thanks: Simon Thommes, Fiona Cohen