I fell down a rabbit hole and I’m still falling

My animation aspirations are a work in progress but here’s documentation of the journey thus far…

I have a been on a bit of an obsessive binge with Blender ever since I saw a friend of mine make an awesome render of a donut last year. I have been hooked on creating in this environment. I have tried to use other 3D pipeline environments and I always end up frustrated and confused as heck. That probably has something to do with the fact that I’m still a complete novice at Blender, but I’ve become accustomed to the interface through research, practice, and YouTube videos. So, I decided that for the foreseeable future I will focus on Blender as my primary environment until I know enough not to confuse myself trying to create on multiple softwares before I comprehend one.

All that being said, I love 3D Artistry and over the weekend I discovered this guy Nathan who runs an account called Ducky3D and I was awestruck by his work. He taught himself entirely through YouTube and now works as a Professional Motion Designer. Anyway, I’m getting off track sorry! Back to my work in progress. I saw this video he made recently and I really wanted to give it a shot by adapting it to fit the assignment of an animation for the Studio spoiler alert I should have known “Easy” doesn’t really mean easy when your winging it. Nevertheless, I really wanted to learn more about the emission (Glow) node, so I went for it and this is the documentation of what happened.

My inspiration for the render I am trying to make and adapt

I started off with this video just to learn how to import and extrude the studio logo mark below.

Extruding the Curve

I utilized this video to move this object into my file where I began following Nathan’s tutorial.

Appending the object to current file

Originally, I had tried to follow the tutorial Nathan made by replacing the inner box with our studio logo, but because of the distortion to the larger box that encasing it it was difficult if not impossible to see anything at all on the inside of the box. Instead I opted to use the lighting created by the emission and volume notdes to create a somewhat faux holographic affect

All the nodes for the focal point cube

Some nodes for the plane: the effects of this are less prominent on my computer because my computer is not as powerful as the one in the video

It’s not visible but there is a giant cube housing this scene that aides in enhancing the glow of both the area light and the cube so that the logo is visible to see

Right now this project is still a work in progress.

I’m trying to figure out how Nathan was able to track the camera inside the larger cube while it was still visible in the layers panel I have no idea how he did this

I don't know if I'll find out how to do it myself because despite hours of trying to spot the difference in my file and his I don’t see any in regards to this task. So as far as rendering this as an animation I doubt that will happen anytime soon, but I did learn a lot in the process of creating this

Here’s a really cool image I rendered before I got too confused to continue trying to understand and adapt the tutorial

I might keep trying to iterate on this, but to be honest I'm not sure right now after spending hours staring at it I just don't think I have the patience. For now I think I'll take a break and come back to it in the near future. The end goal is to rotate the cube and the mark as well as add a particle system.

I’m proud of my progress given that I knew nothing about the nodes I used before I built the render. I am learning a lot and although I am not yet at the point where I can render and build without a guide to follow iteration of an existing art project is a good start

I threw together a really simple, quick, and messy animation so that I’d I still have something to show for days of effort trying to animate the render above.

Here it is

Here’s a list of other resources I used:

• Blender Hot Keys
• Changing Render Background color
• Key frames & Auto Keying
• Exporting in video format for Blender
• Node Wrangler Documentation