Neon Spores, playing

Neon Spores

A cave of glowing mushrooms answer to the kick and snare, with no part keyframed by hand. See what's driving it:

A finished mix splitting into stems

Pull the drum line out of a mixed track

Drop in the track and it lines up with Sequencer automatically. Stem separation splits the mix into its separate instruments, so you can animate off the drums alone instead of a muddy, combined signal.

From there it's two bands: the kick and the snare, each turned into a trigger. No tempo map, no markers, no prep. Swap out the song for a different file, and the animation will follow.

Three inputs folding into one signal

Swap the input, keep the build

The track isn't the only thing that can play this scene. A MIDI pad and a Note Sequence can feed the same drum signal. Note Sequences help cover the bars where the drums thin out.

Everything downstream asks for the drums and gets them, without ever knowing which source sent it. That's what makes the scene reusable: hand it a different song, play it live off a pad, or rewrite the Note Sequence, and the Motion Graph keeps animating your scene just the same.

Mushroom caps swelling on the drums

Drive hundreds of materials

Each group of mushrooms reads that one drum signal and uses it two ways: the lights buried inside the caps, and the glow in the mushroom material itself. A couple of filters soften it on the way in, so the cave swells with the beat rather than flickering at it. The glow is a material parameter driving each instance.

Vegetation leaning in tempo

Sway in tempo

Plants lean left and right, timed to a factor of the song's tempo rather than a number picked by eye. No drift to dial in, and retiming to a new song is as fast as entering the new BPM.

Kick hitting, god rays punching through

Flash lights and particles

The snare is merged the same way as the kick, then drives blue flower lights and god rays that cut through the haze. Particles all glow in sync using a Material Parameter Collection.

A dozen elements answer the kick and snare without a single keyframe. The video below guides you through the entire setup.

Watch the whole build

Used by the teams behind