Hobbes Event GamingFest 2022
One of the standout events that I attended during this year’s GamingFest was hosted by representatives from the company Hobbes. Hobbes is a Detroit-based company that works in collaboration with Firefly to create elaborate drone shows.
During their presentation, they showed an overview of their work and the challenges that came with some of their projects. They quickly pointed out some of the real-world challenges that come with their work that they have to think about when they design their shows. Some limitations include the number of drones they can use, wind speeds, battery life, FAA regulations, and whether the drones were agile enough for the movements they needed to make in formation. They first started with simple formations that could be achieved with less than 100 drones, but the first challenge was when they were tasked to recreate the Fireball whiskey logo.
The challenge with recreating the Fireball whiskey logo was that the image was very busy and had lots of detail clustered together. Creating dynamic logos like this with drones is difficult because Hobbes will take the design and simplify them. Imagine taking the Mona Lisa and running it through a mosaic filter where the detail is gone but the audience can still tell that it’s the Mona Lisa. This idea needed to be applied to the Fireball logo. So the team worked to try to create the logo in what looked like star constellations in Cinema 4D. After some time, they were able to find the right drone formation that could recreate the logo.
Their website provides insight into their creative process for animating the drones. They said, “To animate a fleet of individual drones, our team treated the drones as pixels, choreographing a show in 3D design software and translating the data into a form readable by a drone fleet.”
Some of the company’s early work focused on creating shows with a flat 2D perspective but eventually, they started to figure out ways of creating images that looked 3D. Since the drones aren’t capable of moving at speeds they need to achieve the effect, the team got creative and used forced perspective to create the illusion of 3D. In addition, they were able to take advantage of how the audience will only view the drones from one perspective, and they were able to choreograph the drones to match that perspective. One show where they were able to show this off was at the 2019 World Scout Jamboree, where they performed in front of an audience of more than 10,000 viewers.
One of the most impressive shows that they pulled off, in my opinion, was where they created a singing mask. The team at Hobbes found that there was an iPhone app that could scan your face and import the tracking data into Cinema 4-d. One problem when they saw the result was that they knew that the drones weren’t going to be able to move faster enough to match the speed of the animated face. After adjusting the animation, they were able to create a show with the signing mask. I encourage everyone to look up on YouTube and watch.
As someone who enjoys flying drones in his free time, I was looking forward to this event. I was not disappointed as I found the event to be both informative and entertaining.