It seems a long time ago I explained to Mute Records how I wanted to create the Maps album artwork purely and mathamatically from the music. Actually, it was a long time ago that’s why, and this week finally sees the record’s release.
The idea was we wanted to make the artwork for the album create itself, so if one day we fired it into space and it landed on the moon then someone could pick it up, decipher it and remake the album. Simple really. The first thing we needed to do was to find away to take data from the music and turn that into something that looked organic, interesting and beautiful.
After about 2 weeks we found a programme called Walrus that allowed us to do exactly that. So, we stripped data from the album fed it into Walrus and converted it into huge decision tree diagrams.
Once we had created the Walrus model we then rebuilt it in 3DStudio Max on a hired Supercomputer, then we rendered and lit the huge structure that was around 5 million faces. This part of the project took about 3 months as each tiny tweak of the camera meant the computer re-rendering everything.
When we have great looking shots of each song's structure we took those renders into Photoshop for some final work on the lighting and atmosphere.
8 months later it was done and Maps release 'We Can Create' on Mute Records, May 14th. The limited Gatefold is out a couple of weeks after, and you should try and get your hands on one, as long as you promise to wear gloves.
See all of the artwork HERE
