Week 4:

4/13/10
I have modified the smoke a little bit to emit smoke more on screen. It still emits according to the bass but as you can see in the video it is still slightly off. It is emitting according to randomly selected spheres scattered through a volume. I am going to fix this so that more sources appear into the emitter group when the bass is prominent. This will make the smoke be more connected with the bass sounds so there will only be a few emitters emitting at a low rate when the bass is absencent or very minimal and just the opposite when it is prominent. The bass has been perfectly isolated from the rest of the tones.

The below video are the lines and streamers I have been working on. I have applied a few attributes such as color and alpha that are based off modified primitive numbers in a VopSop. I have plans with a glow shader to turn them into neon streamers that will use these same color and alpha attributes. It should make for an interesting look.
I have also been thinking about turning them into subtle soft-bodies so the can have a more flowing look. That is at the back of my mind though because I think that may be a bit counter productive when it comes to making them look similar to fluorescent lights.
The streamers are dancing to the main guitar sound. I think it works fairly well but I will be doing some more tweaking to it to make it look more pronounced.

Below is a video of the smoke and streamers together. They are not rendered or even flip-booked together but composited quickly in AfterEffects. The coming week I will be working on the shaders and rendering these so I will have the beginnings to the definite look. I do plan to include more effects while tweaking these.

The next video are the instanced lights. They are the points that are to have the point lights instanced to them. The left side of the video has the points crawling around but are not moving to any tones. The right side is rotating to the main rhythm of the song. I am highly considering changing this so that the crawling point speed is set to the rhythm rather than rotating all around. I have a feeling it may look better.

4/15/10
The below video has the lights instanced and this video is the rotating points. The metaball teapot is only used for reference so I can see the shadows and light colors. I may just leave the lights subtly crawling around to the rhythm while having the light intensity set dramatically to the rhythm. The light intensities below are all the same set to 0.1 with colors including red, yellow, blue, and white. They are instanced randomly to the points.

I am trying to get the streamers to emit light and look like the neon pipes that are seen in bar windows. This will give a good quality to the smoke and any other elements in the piece. I have created a light template with an incandescent light shader in it so that any colors above a value 1 will emit light. I am getting decent results but I want them to glow more and have a bit of a haze around them. The haze may later be added though in post.

I started getting some better results in the below video. I switched my rendering from Micro-Polygon to Physically Based Rendering (PBR). It is a lot better glow/neon effect I still want more though. I think to get more glow I just need to crank the color values even higher above one and change a few things in the incandescent light shader to get a real neon look. I also had to crank the samples up about 3 times as much as before so I could get smoother light scatter on objects.