Magic Music Visuals

Warning, a bit flashy in places:


All timed (multi case switch expression on the Playback time) and rendered in Magic with elements from DALLE-2 and lots of TV shaders. 3D model totally within Magic too.

Great work Sadler!
I love the animation.

Thanks Terry, you might recognise the grinning mug!

This face is killing me

Although it fits the genre perfectly, it's a bit too fast-paced (at least for me) to really enjoy because it takes my attention away from the music.
That being said, it's really, really well done with lots of cool effects!

TKS wrote:Although it fits the genre perfectly, it's a bit too fast-paced (at least for me) to really enjoy because it takes my attention away from the music.

Hey, yes I do know what you mean and I would/should/could have tamed some parts a bit more. It is a good point about which aspect has/should have more dominance - is it a video with music or music with visuals and then all the subtleties in between. For me, in this instance, it makes the music more compelling, more joyful, more gritty etc but then, I'm biased! Critique appreciated though.

cool video, I really love how you got the switching synced so nicely, just curious but could you show the node setup of the "multi case switch expression on the Playback time" would be cool to mess around with something like this at some point.

This sort of workflow would be better suited to a timeline UI but this setup is the closest thing to that, if you want to stay within Magic. I still use a NLE to find the time values for each event then transfer those values to expression variables (100th/sec). The code is my attempt to try and make the entry and editing less tedious, so it comes out looking a bit obscure, but it means I can reuse this code and just change values in the variables. The important thing for any timed expression is the 'inrange' function - simplifies the conditions for activation greatly.

Sadler wrote:The important thing for any timed expression is the 'inrange' function - simplifies the conditions for activation greatly.

I've never noticed the 'inrange' function, so far I've always used millions of if() statements, which are a bit better readable, but as you said, hard to reuse.

Thanks Sadler

I had no clue you could actually do stuff like that with expressions in magic! Thanks a lot for the info, hopefully I can figure out a good way to use this info.

Huge thank you for this! I've been trying to figure out how to do timing and I've been waiting for some timeline UI. I don't mind writing code so this will be extremely useful.

Nice video and very interesting information's about the expressions for timing!

My first thought... there's no way this was done entirely in Magic. But, after reading the replies, I was thoroughly amazed to find out that it was!

Incredibly crafty!

This is really nice Sadler. You're getting quite good not just at the visuals themselves but at the overall process of making a video that keeps being interesting for several minutes.