For a long time I've wanted to revisit the Vector Recursion Workbench software collaboration I did with Nathan Williams. So I generated an SVG from the software and imported it into Maya. My first experiments proved fruitful in extruding each of the shapes individually and then moving each shape to create a stepped pyramid. From there I did different iterations with animation, have the shapes rotate in unison, have the shapes rotate out of phase, animate the shapes using the vertical Z dimension. Every other shape has a black hole shader applied, so the alpha is cutout at rendertime.

Towards the end I wasn't enjoying how everything was constantly visible and it needed some mystery. So I created a 3D watery plane, applied the black hole shader, and then animated it oscillate up and down. So it occasionally hides the recursion shapes and yet the water texture ensures that it's always slightly randomized for what is hidden.

I normally render a motion vector AOV pass so that I can use the RSMB Vectors plug-in to add realistic motion blur in post and avoid the heavy hit in Redshift render time. But the motion vector AOV pass doesn't consider the transparency part of the shader, so it wasn't fully accurate. Instead I just let the RSMB plug-in analyize the beauty pass directly to calculate the motion blur on its own. The visuals are moving so fast in this scene that the RSMB plug-in occasionally glitches out, actually in a very pleasing way. But I rendered out alternate versions without motion blur just for some options depending on the look you're going after.

I had an utter bonanza when I injected the loops into NestDrop. I'm such a sucker for the glitched out feedback loops that mix a look of digital versus organic. Stupid Youtube... its compression really kills the detail for some of these, but the MOV versions are so juicy.

Released December 2020