This month’s VJ clip reward on Patreon is Dark Altar. Check it out:
Available On Patreon
Dark Altar is a set of 11 VJ clips, in 1080p & 2160p DXV. It includes the altar in 3 variations: Rotation, Beat-emissive & Reveals, and 8 elements as Skull, Crystals, Pentagram, horns that can be building blocks for many more looks. It’s available now and until 30th November to superfans who support us on Patreon.
Fans also get a Resolume Arena project with the original clips and with variations that are made out of the elements. Use the Mask Mode to slice one layer and reveal another or trigger the elements & variations, each one from its layer to compose different looks easily. Using the project should save you time and effort – time that you could invest in better mapping and preparing for your performance. More on that in the tutorial below.
Serving Suggestions
This short tutorial should bring you up to speed of the 11 clips & ways of mixing them. Use this and the Arena project as a starting point for your performance – from here you can only go up! (or down, if Hell is your destination this Halloween).
Creating Dark Altar
Halloween was a good excuse to create some darker visuals that might not fit your ordinary show. After researching about Halloween on Pinterest and getting nausea from seeing too many pumpkins I decided to go for an altar of some sort and get some evil motifs as part of the worshiping process.
I created a board on Pinterest and started pinning dark motifs / altars / rituals. At one point, after getting a familiar feeling, I realized that my adolescence included some darker parts while I was a Heavy Metal music fan )) Nothing is in vain haha. Also, perhaps these visuals can be used in a hard rock / heavy metal performance? Mmm interesting…
Searching for assets online I chose to use the platform from the Merlin’s Cave environment as the Altar, the skull & horns from this Ram Skull model, and a free Crystal model. I created the Pentagram and spikes in C4d, imported all the assets into Unreal Engine 5 and started composing the scene.
The first clip I created was the beat-emissive one. I had some issues with artifacts caused by using Lumen and with a little help from my friends (you should join the group) I switched to using nVidia’s RTX GI plugin and it worked like a charm.
I then created the rotating spheres clip and the light-reveals clip. At this point I had 3 beautiful clips and I could call it the day, but something in me, perhaps that juvenile dark-symbols infested boy I was, kept urging me to create separate elements out of the scene. And I’m happy I did. These elements enhance this Dark Altar set and make it a more versatile, modular set – that hopefully opens new possibilities for you the performers – in perfectly mapping the elements into your venue’s mapping setup or in using just some parts of the elements in shows that are not necessarily related to Halloween in the future.
What's next?
I hope that the demons that took over my soul and made me create these Dark Altar visuals will leave my body and I’ll be back into making happy visuals in no time ))
What will it be next month? I wonder… If you wanna see more frequent updates and in-process videos, consider following on Instagram / Facebook where I currently publish stories.
Kill it on your Halloween performance! 🤘
