blender-style-abstract

name

blender-style-abstract

description

Abstract procedural-emission style for Blender music videos — colour fields driven by Noise→ColorRamp shaders, scrolling and pulsing to the music ("Shadertoy in Eevee"). No 3D world, no silhouettes — pure motion + colour. Use for techno/IDM/ambient (Rone, Skee Mask, Floating Points, HOME). The runnable, render-verified reference style for the kit. Built on tools/blender_style_kit.py. See [[blender-styles]].

blender-style: Abstract

Pure colour-field motion — emission planes driven by procedural textures, scrolling and pulsing with the song. No meshes-as-objects, no narrative world. Cheap, hypnotic, and the cleanest fit for sleek/futuristic music where PS1 would be wrong. This is the worked, render-verified reference style: tools/blender_style_abstract.py.

Visual DNA

• Procedural fields, not geometry. TexCoord → Mapping → Noise → ColorRamp → Hue/Sat → Emission. The image is the shader, painted on a big camera-facing plane.
• Layered fields at coprime drift rates → endless, never-looping motion (same coprime trick as [[strudel-automation]]).
• Emission-only, dark world → colour glows; additive overlays build depth.
• One palette, restated — a 4-stop ColorRamp (deep indigo → magenta → amber → near-white); hue breathes with the mids.
• Reactivity is the point: rms/bass→backdrop brightness, flux→overlay flashes + core bloom, high→shimmer, mid→hue drift. A central core glow blooms on the beat.

Recipe

Full material + scene: tools/blender_style_abstract.py. The heart is the field material — Generated → Mapping → Noise → ColorRamp → Hue/Sat → Emission, returning the Mapping / Emission / Hue nodes so the reactor can scroll, pulse, and hue-shift them:

def field_material(name, palette, scale=3.0, detail=6.0):
    mat = bpy.data.materials.new(name); mat.use_nodes = True
    nt = mat.node_tree; nt.nodes.clear()
    out   = nt.nodes.new("ShaderNodeOutputMaterial"); coord = nt.nodes.new("ShaderNodeTexCoord")
    mapping = nt.nodes.new("ShaderNodeMapping");       noise = nt.nodes.new("ShaderNodeTexNoise")
    noise.inputs["Scale"].default_value = scale; noise.inputs["Detail"].default_value = detail
    ramp  = nt.nodes.new("ShaderNodeValToRGB")        # set 4 palette stops on ramp.color_ramp
    huesat = nt.nodes.new("ShaderNodeHueSaturation"); em = nt.nodes.new("ShaderNodeEmission")
    L = nt.links.new
    L(coord.outputs["Generated"], mapping.inputs["Vector"]); L(mapping.outputs["Vector"], noise.inputs["Vector"])
    L(noise.outputs["Fac"], ramp.inputs["Fac"]); L(ramp.outputs["Color"], huesat.inputs["Color"])
    L(huesat.outputs["Color"], em.inputs["Color"]); L(em.outputs[0], out.inputs[0])
    return mat, mapping, em, huesat

…and the reactor scrolls the mapping + pulses emission per frame:

def react(ft, progress, frame):
    back_map.inputs["Location"].default_value = (0.0, progress*1.4, progress*2.1)   # drift
    over_map.inputs["Location"].default_value = (progress*-1.9, progress*3.3, 0.0)  # coprime drift
    back_em.inputs["Strength"].default_value = 0.8 + 1.6*ft["rms"] + 0.8*ft["bass"]
    over_em.inputs["Strength"].default_value = 0.25 + 1.4*ft["flux"] + 0.5*ft["high"]
    back_hs.inputs["Hue"].default_value = 0.5 + 0.06*(ft["mid"]-0.5)                 # hue breathes
    s = 4.5 + 7.0*ft["bass"] + 5.0*ft["flux"]; core.scale = (s, s, 1)               # beat bloom

Run / probe:

blender --background --python tools/blender_style_abstract.py -- \
  --audio renders/<song>/source.wav --features renders/<song>/audio_features_24fps.json \
  --output /tmp/<song>_abstract.mp4 --width 320 --height 180 --fps 24 \
  --start-frame 1 --end-frame 240 --still-frames 1,120,240 --save-blend

Verified

Rendered clean in Blender 5.1.2 (headless EEVEE_NEXT; exit 0; PNG stills written) and inspected by eye: frame 1 = warm indigo→magenta→amber marbled field; frame 120 = shifted to pink/coral with the flow moved on — confirming the scroll, hue-breathe, and emission reactivity all work end-to-end. This is the style to copy as the template when building a new look on the kit. (Harmless: a use_nodes deprecation warning for Blender 6.0.)

Variations

• Swap Noise for Wave (ShaderNodeTexWave) → streaky interference. Add Voronoi → cellular/caustic.
• Drive the ColorRamp via a MixRGB between two palettes by bass for a two-mood track.
• For raymarched/SDF aesthetics, crib math from terkelg/awesome-creative-coding (Book of Shaders / Inigo Quilez) into an OSL/script node or a baked sequence.

When to use

Sleek, futuristic, hypnotic, beat-driven — Rone, Skee Mask, Floating Points, HOME, techno/IDM/ambient. The anti-PS1: reach here when the song is not nostalgic. Not for warm narrative worlds (→ [[blender-style-ps1]]) or painterly (→ [[blender-style-watercolor]]). Compose with [[blender-3d-concepts]]; verify with [[blender-video-iteration]].