Immerse Yourself in Galactic Beauty

Japanese 3D professional Takayuki Sato's work primarily focuses on directing and motion design but he also expresses his creativity in still images. His clients include renowned companies in the US, Europe and Asia. While working on such high-end projects as the title sequence for the television series Heroes Reborn and the credits for the movie Star Trek Beyond, he also found time to work on the project The Moment of Beauty. Sato then presented the sequel, Beyond the Moment of Beauty, in December, 2016.

Even though it was not planned as a sequel, the first sketches for Beyond the Moment of Beauty showed numerous parallels to The Moment of Beauty. Takayuki Sato remembers that so much of what was being sketched seemed so familiar that he decided to revive the original concept from 2014 with a new view of the world.

It wasn't easy creating a filigree world that was constantly changing, growing and transforming. "In this work, I wanted to apply the new skills I had attained over the past few years. The challenging part was putting the images in my mind's eye to film", says Sato.

In 2015, Takayuki Sato had already tried to realize his vision as a film and although he was able to create a style frame of his vision, the underlying story distracted far too much from the imagery - which was more important for Takayuki Sato. He made a second attempt but was again not able to create the animations exactly as he wanted and ended up not completing this venture either.

"After the project had been restarted twice from the ground up I was finally able to create the imagery and animations that I had imagined and to the standards that I wanted", explains Takayuki.

"Cinema 4D played the key role in the project's realization. The floors, stones, plants, birds, the waterfall, the planets and the stellar fog - and much more: with the exception of the characters and several effects, everything was created in and rendered with Cinema 4D. The compositing was done in After Effects", remembers Takayuki Sato. "I worked with Release 18 and I was particularly impressed with the new Parallax shader, which I used for the floor. I also applied displacement to several materials in the scene and got great results!"

"I used the new Thinfilm shader, which was added to Release 18, to create the crystals' material", remembers Takayuki, "and I am very happy with the result!"

"I created many of the effects using XParticles and Turbulence FD. XParticles itself is a very powerful tool for creating large numbers of images and impressions, which is why I used it for many of the scenes", says Takayuki. "The connectivity between Cinema 4D and XParticles, Turbulence FD and Krakatoa made it possible for me to finally realize my visions. This project was also an excellent opportunity to get to know these tools."