Josiah Lowe and I have been collaborating on some still vector art lately and so we decided to see what could happen if I animated it. We agreed on a theme of an abstract jungle and see where it would lead us. Josiah created some fresh artwork in Illustrator, including a range of beautiful shapes that were reminiscent of plants. I then converted it into an SVG and imported it into Maya.

The “hills grass” scenes used one of Josiah’s drawings and replicated it x50,000 onto a hilly terrain using MASH. The hilly terrain was created by applying some wave noise into a texture deformer on a poly plane. The “hills arms” scenes use another drawing by Josiah. Due to the way he laid out the shapes, it inspired me to rig each section and make it almost like a robotic arm. Surprisingly the end result reminds me of a stork bird looking for bugs to eat.

The “cave” scenes started by trying to use many of Josiah’s drawings as fruit hanging from a tree, but I couldn’t get a result that I was happy with. So then I started experimenting with the ‘duplicate special’ tool in Maya which allowed me to add a tiny amount of rotation to each new duplicated shape and then repeat x1000 to create a long column. Then I applied that same technique to the 17 other drawings. From there I just applied some slow animated rotation to each group and arranged them to make a tunnel, making sure that the camera didn’t crash into any of the shapes. I found some interesting reflections using glass and metal material combinations and placing area lights at even intervals within the tunnel.

The “tree fly” scenes were originally created to layer on top of the “hills grass” renders, but it just didn’t feel right to me and so I kept it separate. The “moving lights” scenes were an interesting test of Redshift since I wanted to have columns of light moving through the scene. So I created a directional light and a bunch of polygon strips, leaving empty space between each strip, animated the whole group of strips, and then enabled global illumination. The Japanese Maple trees were sourced from Mantissa.

This time around I took a different approach for the NestDrop remixes. Instead of injecting the videos into NestDrop, I recorded the NestDrop visuals by itself and then brought everything in After Effects. This allowed me to test out various compositing ideas and use some fun layering tricks and added effects.

Released May 2021