I was hired by a heavy metal musician to prototype some volume-responsive special effects. I threw together some scratch visuals to demonstrate the possibilities, and had a lot of fun in the process.

I used a fractal generator plugin to feed volume data into the spiral seen at the end of one video.

My familiarity with the volumetric sky allowed me to demonstrate some awesome “glitchy” green light in the clouds.

Later on, I applied my knowledge to recreate a vision the Grammy-award winning Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails described in an interview in the late 1990s. The interview in question was never digitized as far as I can tell, but he lamented the fact that game engines in those days could not keep metronome accurate timing for events.

Reznor had originally imagined the soundtrack for Quake to utilize 3D models of industrial machinery creating the hammering rhythms and groaning metallic melodies of his industrial soundscape. These machines would beat in time to the music, actually creating the audio at their location, so that as you progress through the level, the song would “remix” based on your position, and progress with you as you traverse the level. This vision was never seen to life in Quake.

When Epic announced the Quartz Clock for Unreal Engine, I knew that Trent Reznor’s vision was now a possible reality. Epic was able to synchronize all game events to a metronome accurate clock. This is so huge. I immediately endeavored to feed data from the separated stems Reznor officially released for his work, so that I could trigger synthesizers, drums, and vocals at different locations in the game world, and cause animated machinery in the world to “play” the sound with their movement. It’s a rough prototype, but it works!