Luigi Honorat was commissioned by Apple to produced a new CG animation. The film is part of a series of films by different artists, filmmakers and designers which have been made to promote and test the limits of the iMac Pro. Besides Honorat, the artists in the Creator Series are Buck, Erin Sarofsky, Esteban Diácono, ManvsMachine and Michelle Dougherty. Scroll to the bottom to view a behind-the-scenes interviewe with Honorat.

The piece shows a group of digital forms, each with very different properties, moving and transforming within digital room-like spaces. At intervals the spaces themselves collapse, wiping the slate clean for the next form and environment. The forms are digitally produced using Houdini and Arnold. The film also features a soundtrack by Massive Attack, whose track Angel was procedurally remixed by Fantom.

Honorat, a CG artist and sculpture, constantly returns to physical forms during his digital production process. He makes physical models of his forms, which he uses to inform their digital construction, and projects into physical spaces to inform his digital ones. “This project, it’s kind of form studies...so while I’m working I’m trying to think ‘how would I make it if it would be like a real sculpture?’ I’m trying to stay within a scope of shapes that are doable by hand."

The motion of the forms is digitally determined but also controlled by Honorat’s pre-programming - for the fluid simulation scene Honorat structured the fluid mass and the software simulated its action. “I built the wave in Houdini and I really made it like it would work, like a huge volume of fluid, and let the simulation go from there”.

The commission comes at the same time as Honorat launches a new work on Sedition. View Intangible | Spherical Slices Rotation here.