These were some really fun experiments. Seeing as how much I've enjoyed the happy accidents of injecting Maya renders into NestDrop lately, I had the crazy idea of going the other direction... Injecting NestDrop recordings into Maya. I have been wanting to explore animated displacement maps and so this was a good reason to try it out.

It took some trial and error to nail down a good workflow. If I imported the raw NestDrop frame sequence directly into Maya then the displacement appeared too harsh in the Maya renders. So after recording the Nestdrop visuals then I treated it in After Effects. I simply made it black and white, duplicated the layer and applied a multiply blend mode along with some fast blur. This blur was critical for rounding out some of the harsh forms of when the displacement was rendered over in Maya. Then rendered out each of the videos to a PNG frame sequence for linking into Maya.

Empty space is so useful especially when it comes to alpha. But when I linked the animated displacement map then it rendered as an utter solid. So I created another poly plane and applied a black hole shader so that I could hide any of the boring aspects at rendertime, along with generating an alpha channel. This worked marvelously and allowed even more happy accidents in a process already fully guided by happy accidents.

And of course, what's to stop me from then taking the resulting Maya renders and doing another round of NestDrop remixes? Since each of the Maya renders have an alpha channel, I couldn't help myself. What an ouroboros this pack has become.

Released February 2021