The Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida is known not just for its high quality collection of many of Salvador Dali’s works, but also its cutting-edge Dali 360 experience. We visited the Dali museum to study his work.
Research
Dali's Art
Dali is the face of surreal art for good reason. His style usually incorporates flat horizons, geometric patterns that turn into a recognizable object, faces within other objects, and an overall distortion of reality. A master of eye flow, many of Dali’s works reveal details at different points of observation.
The Dome
The museum’s cutting edge dome shows a phenomenal 360 documentary detailing Dali’s life, the evolution of his artwork, and takes you into a mind-melting world of surreality. Even the floor could be projected on.
The museum usually has a secondary exhibit showcasing a unique aspect of Dali. On this visit, it was his inspiration. Seeing how artists absorbed Dali in not just his style, but how his approach to art, the spirituality of all substances, experimenting with new techniques, etc.
Murals
Inspired By Dali
Brief
The project's mission was to create an animatic for a minute-long looping animation to play in the background of fundraisers, dinners, and events held in the 360 Dome. The animation would have to be calming and dreamlike, reminiscent of Dali's style and appeal, without using any of his official artwork. This would be an inspired piece of projection mapping.
This project would require a delicate balance across many spectrums. Calming, ambient, and still intriguing without being distracting or too intense. It must feel like Dali without using any of his artwork, as well as replicate his sense of imagination, detail, and nuance in a medium that requires ignoring nuance to be legible with high contrast imagery.
Challenge
Proposed Directions
Dreamscape Aquarium
Taking the gulf coast into account, we imagine a fantastic underwater world filled with the strangeness and otherworldly elements that Dali was known for.
Deflate-Reflate
Dali is well known for his melting clocks, and seeing this in motion is engrossing to observe. Taking it one step further, we played into the unexpected and pitched having objects not just melt and deflate, but then re-inflate and float back up to their starting point to create an ambient surreal animation loop.
Focus
Reminiscent of his Lincoln in Dalivision, we would make a Dali-esque composition with out of focus elements that the viewer could only see what they truly were when a lens passed over them and brought the object(s) into focus, revealing them to be something else.
Development
First Pass
Getting as many ideas out at the start. Playing with the depth and uncanny nature of the objects would help immerse the viewers. Our sweet spot would have to be right above the horizon.
A project with this quick of a turnaround time had to be up and running asap. Most of the assets were grabbed from Turbosquid and Sketchfab.
Technical Workflow
One of our faculty, David Brodeur, who had previously worked on the Las Vegas Sphere, crafted a template for us to use for the Dali Dome. Our work flow completely changed, with a better understanding of the task.
1
Since there is no focal point, every object has to be rendered head-onto avoid warping. We placed a 3D model of the dome in our scene.
2
We placed our camera in the dome to render each element separately, cross-referencing its coordinates on the dome.
3
We then matched the render output to its coordinates in the after effects converter template.
We did this for all the elements.
4
5
Once our scene was complete, we warped it into a circle that could be projected back onto the dome as its 3d texture.
To check that the perspective is correct, we projected the render on the 3D model of the dome to make sure the distortion was minimal.
Other Passes
This was the most accurate way to place objects, but was far too time-consuming for an entire 360 environment. To reduce render time, we focused on making a smaller scene that could
Final
Pan
Mock - Up
Recap
This project covered every pillar of design. How do we make it feel underwater, and also like Dali? This tested our organization, planning renders, adapting to new design hurdles (distortion, style changes, making sure there are no seems) and working within a team. Thank you to Ryan Cross for being an amazing teammate.