Game Engines use in 3D Printing with Crabtree & Evans
Artists Julia Crabtree and William Evans digitally re-created the Cosmic Anisotropy Telescope located in Cambridge, UK as part of their residency at Wysing Arts Centre. Working in collaboration with Werkflow Studio, they used UE4 to build an interactive scenario. This was to enable the artists to resculpt the form of the telescope into different shapes within the virtual landscape..
Textures for the telescope were built from iPhone images of the location, taken by the artists and used to create the meta-topography of the Cambridge landscape. Once refined, these textures served a dual purpose - applied to the digital model itself, and later incorporated into large prints shown as part of a group show at Wysing.
The virtual landscape was purposely abstracted from the actual site location of the telescope and the sounds of the metal peices moving when the user interacts with them are actually sampled from traditional Japanese theatre instruments. This makes for a very odd audio-visual discordance.
The end result Critters (2015) represents an object which struggles to animate itself within a recreated meta-landscape of rural Cambridgeshire. We worked with artists Julia Crabtree and William Evans and Werkflow Studio to produce a bespoke application. We used Oculus Rift/Game Engine technology to create a CGI animation as well as a suite of 3D printed objects and prints from the Game engine data. We created a (almost) Random Object Generator which can easily produce an seemingly limitless series of unique artworks and objects,