Thanks for all of the help so far!
I’m not familiar with how the macro UV’s work in this case, so I’ll run that by my artist and see what he knows. Maybe we can find some luck in that direction, but based on your description I’m not too sure.
to give you some background (which will probably help), I’m making a VR media player. What makes this difficult for me is that I have 2 main requirements I need to fulfill.
1st is that the many objects in the environment we’re ultimately making are going to move to music dynamically using some real time audio analysis tools I’ve got. We will impose behavior limitations to things to give them a range of actions and motions, but for the most part, the only time things have a chance at behaving identically a second time is if the user plays the same song again (assuming we don’t use any randomizing on the visuals). so a visual like this ultimately needs to be fully dynamic.
2nd is that this is a VR project. So users will not only get a full 360 view, but depth as well and I know how important shadowing is for depth perception. The effects look very pretty while glowy, but in VR land it looks a bit flat currently (especially on a mostly empty world). The reason is that there are 3 main factors used for brain depth cues. first is size to indicate distance (things don’t tend to scale in real life), second is movement over distance (Parallax), and third is shadowing. 2 of these are usually enough to determine depth but any conflicts the brain receives *can * lead to sickness. I also read somewhere that women prioritize shadow cue’s over parallax in visual processing. so yeah… Without particles casting shadows on each other, I run the risk of some users getting sick more easily. I guess I cant use particles as a main attraction like I currently am.
Since the project is still in early stages we wanted to capture the richness behind a song (pitch, onsets, and the timing of the rhythm) to create some organic movement with a particle system since it seemed like an easy place to start and its fairly abstract. something like the simple and yet rich movement seen in the youtube video in the original post (copy paste of link: Entering The Stronghold | Audio Visual Animation HD! - YouTube ) with the added bonus that it wasn’t limited to a fixed perspective. The rest is history. Seems I’ve hit a brick wall and lost quite a bit of time. If there is a solution to this I would love to find it, but I’m going to have to pursue other options meanwhile.