LogIn3D Artist Idean Keshmirian showcased a stunning, frenetic toon-shaded hyperlapse made with Blender's Geometry Nodes and shared a quick breakdown, linking the references.
This amazing work, looking like an intro for a racing game or a '90s anime, was made in Blender by 3D Artist Idean Keshmirian.
Inspired by Weval's music video for Someday, the artist came up with ways to recreate similar effects in Blender and produced an edit with the best shots. The technique is essentially the camera tracking an empty and changing the empty position by 1-floor height per frame. For the traffic lights, Idean Keshmirian aligned every red light to a fixed circular empty and scrubbed through them with Geometry Nodes, with a simple random building generator in the background.
If you want to learn how it was made, Idean Keshmirian gladly answered other users' questions and shared their Geometry Nodes setup:
Image Credits: Idean Keshmirian
"Upclose Windows: The bottom row of nodes provides the bright white glimmers and the top row provides the blueish splotches. Both work the same: make a Bump Map with Voronoi, feed it into any BSDF, convert to RGB, and color ramp it.
I add the two shaders together and then slightly mix them with a transparency shader so that whatever is behind the windows is slightly visible."
Image Credits: Idean Keshmirian
"White concrete main shader: I know it looks messy, but it's actually simple. At the top left I am mixing the texture coordinates with noise to create a distorted texture coordinate that, when stretched on one axis and applied to a Voronoi texture, quite closely looks like brushstrokes, I absolutely love this trick. I pass that into a hue/separation/value node to basically add or reduce the value from the main texture in a brushstrokey way, i.e. imperfections."
At the bottom, I am using a greeble texture generated using JSPlacement which is free to add or remove value similarly to above, creating mechanical grooves and features this time.
Finally, I mix all that together against a dark base color and pass it as the color into a diffuse node. Keep in mind I am using a really strong sun here, strength 100, to force the texture to glisten white in the sun and still be blueish-dark in the shadows. There's 100% a more sensible way to do this than what I did, so do not look too deeply into the sloppiness of this shader thinking that you're missing something – it is probably overengineered and not optimal."
Image Credits: Idean Keshmirian
"Distant windows, the black windows on far away buildings: I discovered that using a 3D Voronoi texture with randomness set to 0 gives way more control than trying to wrestle a brick shader into doing what you want and looking like building windows.
I warble and distort the texture coordinates using a Voronoi texture to get some imperfections. You can ignore the nodes on the bottom that run into the multiply-color node, they have no impact. I was trying to add more imperfection with them but it was fruitless."
In the original Reddit post, Idean Keshmirian also shares 3D assets and resources, including YouTube tutorials on similar techniques. Check it out here and visit the artist's Instagram page for more great art.
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