This month’s VJ clip reward on Patreon is Alienated, check it out:
Available On Patreon
Alienated is a set of 6 VJ clips, in 1080p & 2160p DXV. It includes a journey through an alien tunnel, light reveals & light chases of the tunnel, an opening gate and an alien artifact. It’s available now and until 31st December 2022 to superfans on Patreon.
Superfans also get a Resolume Arena project with variations to the clips & mixing arrangements that are set-up in columns. More on that in the Tutorial below.
How To Mix Alienated On Resolume Arena
Get to know the Alienated reward and how to mix it, why I created a gate clip, and how to open and close it. Some radial & linear tricks and one reference to an inspiring movie.
Creation Process
Alienated is created with assets from the Alien Sci-fi Corridor and the Control Screen packs.
I followed the same technique I used to create the Subway reward, I first assembled one unit (incl. floor, walls, ceiling & lights), then collected the parts into a blueprint (in Unreal’s menu: Convert Selection to Blueprint Class, then Harvest Components). I then created a copy of the blueprint and moved it closer, repeating this 8 times to create a corridor. I adjusted the lights’ intensity on the blueprint (and it immediately affected my scene), because having 8 parts one after the other had accumulated too much light in the scene. I then added the Gate’s parts at its end and opened-closed the gate like a happy child.
Now I had to create a copy of this whole corridor and push it in the distance so it’ll loop when the camera flies through the scene. At first I wanted to harvest the entire corridor’s blueprints into a “master” blueprint, but then, not wanting to over-complicate things, I just duplicated the 8 blueprint parts & gate, and moved them backwards.
Here’s how it looked inside Unreal Engine after the scene was assembled:
Creating The Clips
The first clip I rendered was the camera flying through the corridor; the camera is animated on its X axis inside a level sequence. I added some volumetric fog to make it look more eerie.
I then duplicated that level and, using the exact camera animation, added a point light to the scene and animated its position and strength in the sequencer.
Next, I repeated the same steps but this time the point light had 4 different locations – what created the 3rd, light-chase, clip.
I felt that I could utilize the gate to create a sort of “framing” element, so I created another sequence where the camera is stationary, and the gate animated up and down on its Z axis. Everything looked great but I still wanted to create another element; looking through the assets of the same studio who created the corridor, I saw a couple of weird meshes in their Control Screen pack.
It included a bunch of Alien Artifacts (for lack of a better word). I chose one and, by duplicating it and rotating on its Y axis, created a radial cloner array out of it. I placed it in the corridor and just let it “hover” there; I loved how it looked.
I then decided that having a single artifact element could be useful as a building-block for many other arrays inside Arena, so I made it pan right & left gently, and rendered that 6th final clip.
And there you go, Alienated was ready to be released to the human-dominated world.