The Heart of Man

I decided to play around with something that I know of but haven't done a lot with it. And that's using sound as a main animation driver.

But I first needed a mesh, something interesting.. I knew I wanted to use the A.N.T Landscape add-on for Blender. While playing with the parameters I got inspired by the video game DEATH STRANDING. Specifically the black goo type material and the gold that fits with it ( no spoilers ). 

I got an interesting shape and thought to try and see what I can do with it further with added modifiers. I used "Cast" , "Displace" and.. "Wireframe". Wireframe turned out to work perfectly, after decimating the object first to make it less heavy. 

The results were very random and satisfying after adding a subdivision-surface modifier. 

I then added the ball and wireframe together. See below: 

I then started to do some look development, made a simple black and gold material and made a cycles and eevee render.

I added a simple particle system to fill in the empty spaces around the object.

This is what I got at this point:

As a test, I rendered an eevee animation: 

I used the "bake sound to f-curve" within the graph editor to link certain parameters to the frequency of the sound. The sound I used was a heart beat. 

I took screenshots of my process here:

After some tweaking -

 And setting up some limit modifiers within the graph editor ( shown in the screenshots above ).

You could go one step further and convert these f-curves into keys, which gives you complete control to edit it even more manually, but since I didn't want to make things too complicated for myself, I decided against it.

I decided to make renders within eevee for the seperate objects before adding them together, for testing purposes:

After adding them together and post production. . . (Cycles render)

The Final result:

Some extra renders from eevee:

Overall, I now feel comfortable using the "bake sound to f-curve" function within blender, and it was a good recap on how graphs work, I also learned more about the A.N.T Landscape add-on as well as some modifiers that I'll surely try to use in the future ( now that I  know about it ).

It was a nice side project and I'm keen to share my process.