Motion Palette
Research and design / Motion exploration / Creativity support digital tool
In parametric design and generative art, designers and artists often fall into struggling with their tools rather than focusing on the artistic expression itself. Unlike traditional artists, e.g. painters, directly manipulating visual elements, their outcomes are controlled by parameters and dynamically generated, thus influencing their creative process to be confined in text based programming, visual programming, or manipulating parameters in properties panels. This disparity between the creative process and their final creation leads to fumbling back and forth in between and searching for the right parameters that control the right portion of the outcome. Consequently, they end up testing parameters in small steps one by one to see all possible variations from which they can pick out the interesting generations. Here is where my research comes in. I want to facilitate this exploration process, make it visual directed, and reduce the hassle of trial and error.
Key Contributions
Design Concept: Motion Palette
Flexible "extreme states" and fluidly transitioning "interpolation states"
A customizable motion palette, can be defined by "extreme states".
Customization Example: Laban movement qualities
8 effort actions in 3 dimensions
An example of a two-layer motion palette, inspired by Laban movement qualities.
Extend to other systems
The exploration tool can be applied to other procedural systems as well
For example, shader artists can use this tool for live performance.
Future Work
This research project can be further expanded in these directions:
- Reinforcement learning can be combined with the tool to find extreme states to form the palettes
- Currently the multi-dimensional parameter space is compressed onto a 2D surface, but it can also be compressed into a 3D space where the palettes can be manipulated through AR/VR interaction techniques
- The current application scenarios are focused on parametric design and generative art, but the tool can be applied to any multi-state systems controlled by multi-parameters