BOREALIS
- A Space Suite -
In this section, the Borealis artwork and music creation processes are explained, showing the software and workflow generally used for that purpose.
Click on the speakers to listen to Borealis music while you navigate through this page
Artwork
To create the humble images that accompany some of the Borealis chapters I have used some old software I feel comfortable with, and then I have used GIMP to produce some of the effects one can find in them and to edit other parameters of the images.
Let's take, for instance, a very simple image from Borealis Part 2, Chapter IV, "Circumstellar Disc":
To create it, I firstly generated a fractal image with Apophysis 2.09, and applied to it a "Swirl" variation to get the circumstellar disc. (Although I could have created it with a 3D image creation software, I decided to make from a fractal image, just for the pleasure to do it that way):
I then edited its different parameters in order to get the result I was looking for:
That's the render result I got, a transparent image of the circumstellar disc's draft:
I opened it with GIMP to modify its shape into an ellipse:
After that, I used Bryce Pro 7.1 to generate a 3D space image. I started by creting the sky with its Sky lab:
Then I took the circumstellar disc transparency into Bryce Pro 7.1 and gave it some prespective changes to use it in the final rendered image:
I also used Bryce 7.1 to create a sphere that would become, after some tweaking, the HD 77581 star that appears in the chpater; the one surrounded by the circumstellar disc:
With the software's "Material Lab" help, I edited the sphere's the texture, transparency, metallicity, diffusion, and all the other characteristics of it to make it look like my idea of the HD 77581 star:
Now that I had the star and its circumstellar disc, I just had to merge them, and launch the rendering process to get the final image:
Nice! :) But... 0-o wait a minute! The HD 77581 star is a B33-type blue supergiant star!! -.- Hopefully, with the help of the software's "Material Lab" I can give it a blueish appearance:
It goes the same for its circumstellar disc: I could edit it with the Bryce Pro 7.1 "Material Lab" to get a blue appearance for it, but... that would definitely change its fractal texture into something I don't want to! #~&*@!! ¬.¬ -.-
Well... It seems I'm good to start again with Apohysis 2.09 to edit the initial fractal image and then, to repeat the most of all the process' steps!
... one day...
Music
At the myNoise website you can find a good explanation about how to create custom composite generators including the sounds one can pick from the website's index.
You must be a community member to be able to do so.
When you are, you can choose any of the sounds contained in the stems of any of the generators the website proposes, and once you've colected ten of them, you can create your own custom composite generator, being able to apply various effects to every stem in it (volume level, reproduction speed, sound scale, etc.)
For instance, here is a visual of this process concerning the Borealis Part Two chapter VII, "Extravehicular Activity", showing the different stems picked to create the music, and also, an alternative setting proposing the same music without the COMMS sounds:
