Vibing Vertex
Concept
This is one of the rare cases where I am not entirely sure how the idea came into my head despite it not being so long ago. There was almost definitely a part in me that was inspired by the anime Land of the Lustrous' 3D animation and another from seeing really cool animated wallpapers on Wallpaper Engine. But what ended up pushing me into downloading Blender I unfortunately forgot.
My beginning with Blender was very similar to many others: Following BlenderGuru's classic donut tutorial to learn the basics of blender, watching various other tutorials to learn examples of abstract 3D and eventually trying out my own ideas. You can definitely see which tutorials I was following in my earlier animations but over time I tried to create my own concepts and animate them (with varying degrees of success). Somewhere along the way geometry nodes started to come out in Blender which gave me new methods to create unique animations without relying on manual object creation and modeling. After that it’s been a process of trial and error and despite still being far from a blender pro I’ve managed to reach a point where I can usually not worry about the 'how-to' and spend more time trying out ideas (and waiting for them to finish rendering 😉).
A typical animation starts with a lot of trying things out with nodes until something looks interesting. I mostly render everything with Cycles, which looks great but is also very slow with complex scenes or geometry, so before committing to a final render I do many low res test renders to check if the motion and lighting work. Once I am happy with it the final render runs overnight, and some of the more complex ones even took over 30 hours to finish. The finished animations then get posted on my Instagram account @vibingvertex.
Result
Over the years I ended up with a few different animations some of which I am still very proud of. Unfortunately I have not found the time to continue animating as much as I would like and the recent advancements in generative AI have swindled my motivation somewhat. Nonetheless I am still keeping up with Blender and its continued updates and I am sure I will come back to this project one day.
Below are a few screenshots of my favorite animations and you can see the full version of all of the animations I made on my Instagram or the full res version on Youtube.
