Malewitsch

Malewitsch was originally meant to be a proof of concept for Still's new realtime content creation suite for 64kb intros: Tooll. After working ages on abstract bitmap scenes for texture generation, we decided that it would be much better to work on a concrete project. The inspiration for the theme came from lead programmer Daniel Szymanski (cynic), whose common test scene consisted of a black square on a white background: Suprematism at its best.

A world of cubes

I started with sketching in Photoshop and I finally developed a concept around a world of cubes. This basic object promised both to be a sufficient building block for quiet complex scenes and easy enough to be implemented. In a quick session I came up with a motion sketch in Maya which I slightly boosted up with post processing. This was supposed to be our reference for the next couple of months: Our goal was to reproduced this animation in 64kb.
Original 3d models were rebuilt with Tooll using basic mesh and scene operators. With these sample scenes, we worked on a look which was doable with a shader model 2 post render pipeline.
Tooll's very basic instancing and replicate operators proved to be friendly for experiments. Playing around with realtime building blocks became a steady source of inspiration.

Look

I played around with Photoshop to get a grip on a general idea for the lighting and colors. When I was satisfied with my reference image, I spent the next days implementing this look with post render effects.

We finished Malewitsch at the party place in Barcelona. I still remember this as one of my favorite demo scene events because of the wonderful familiar atmosphere and all the great people we met there.