Adaptation B: Audiowave Node Test #8 - Displacement Map & After Effects

 Yesterday I decided to try using the Audio Wave Node to animate a displacement map on a model. I wanted to use my Giacometti sculpt, but for some reason Mudbox now is also giving me some errors whenever but I was able to force it to open long enough to mess around with a basic head mesh (sorry it's nothing spectacular, I just wanted to test it out). I then brought it into Maya and connected the Audio Wave Node to the Scale attribute on the displacement map. I was unable to preview this in the viewport because in order to see the displacement map, I have to render it so it took me a little longer than I expected. I also was unable to use an Alembic Cache (from what I've tried at least) to bake the animation for rendering as well so for a while I was confused as to how I could see if it was working. However, I selected 'Scale' in the channel box and tried going to Key > Bake Animation then I checked the option 'From Channel Box' and it seemed to have worked. I have tried baking the animation on my previous tests using 'Bake Animation' but it didn't work so I'm not sure if I just had the wrong options ticked or not.

After that finished rendering I also thought I'd try to see if I could apply the same sort of thing in After Effects to pair what I've done in Maya. In this case, I plugged in a Turbulence Displacement effect just to see what would happen. I converted the audio to keyframes then I connected the Evolution of the effect to 'Both Channels' on the Audio Keyframes. At first, not much happened but I went into the Evolution expression and added *4 so more movement could be seen. I also dragged some of the keyframes from the audio down so there would be a bit more variation.