Brutalist Core VJ Loops

I’ve done thousand-hands-dance-inspired visuals before in the TeaseMe pack, but this time I envisioned something different—hands projecting laser beams. DeusX felt like the ideal character for this. I imagined him performing a synchronized laser routine, with beams radiating outward from his hands.

I started in Unreal Engine, connecting a small ring as the base for the laser beam, attached to the hands inside the Metahuman blueprint, following this tutorial. Then I added the laser beam itself, an elongated cylinder, binding it to the character’s hand within the sequencer. This allowed me to animate the beam’s length, making it appear as if it was shooting out of the ring, adding a cool dynamic.

With DeusX equipped with lasers, I duplicated the character five times, positioning each slightly behind the other. Now, I had my “dancing band” of five characters. Each was animated manually, using keyframes in the Metahuman’s Control Rig inside the sequencer.

It took a while to get the choreography right. I wanted to have a few phases of the laser beams that one could later ping-pong between, by trimming the loop and bouncing it back and forth inside Resolume. When the first loop was done, I was pretty happy with how it turned out, but I didn’t stop there. I created another loop where the hands opened up simultaneously, then duplicated the sequence and alternated their movement (shifting the keyframes of the left hands forward) to create another loop where where the hands would open up on one side and then on the other side. 

All this was happening against a black background. To emphasize the laser beams, I reused a terrain and planet from my previous DeusX reward, adding red lights that timed with the lasers, illuminating the scene in sync. This gave it a more immersive feel.

I ended up rendering three complete VJ loops, then moved on to the Elemental loops: first, I rendered the rotating planet with a transparent background, then added dynamic lights to the terrain to make it more interesting. Finally, I rendered the DeusX animations on a transparent background.

At the last moment, I decided to create another loop of DeusX without the lasers, using chaotic lights hitting him from all angles. I duplicated the level, removed the lasers, and placed several rectangular lights around DeusX. These were animated to switch on and off rhythmically, resulting in a visually chaotic, beat-synced loop.