Take a single repeating pattern and push it until it becomes an image worth looking at on its own: motion, material and light doing the work that a subject normally would.
Pattern authoring, procedural setup, look development and the animation pass.
A short abstract film and two stills where the pattern reads as a flower at one distance and as pure texture at another.
Blender, After Effects
Context
The idea
A pattern is not a composition. The whole exercise was to give a repeating motif a centre of gravity — a reason for the eye to stop somewhere — without breaking the repetition that defines it.
Why this project matters to my portfolio
There is no client, no brief and no narrative here, which makes it the purest version of a problem I meet constantly: how far a look can be carried by procedural systems and lighting alone, before any art direction is hand-painted on top.
Constraints & Deliverables
Constraints
- Everything visible has to come from one authored motif, instanced.
- No post-production compositing tricks: the falloff is in the scene.
- Two colours only, and they have to mix rather than sit side by side.
Deliverables
- A short looping animation
- A wide still of the full radial field
- A macro still where the motif stops being readable
Pipeline & Process
Pattern & Motion
- Blender
Approach
One curled petal is authored by hand, then instanced across a radial field. Motion is a travelling wave through that field: each instance reads its distance from the centre and opens on a delay, which is what gives the pattern its centre of gravity.
Key technical decisions
- A single hand-authored motif, instanced rather than modelled repeatedly.
- Wave motion driven by radial distance, so the loop closes cleanly.
- Per-instance variation from a seeded attribute, so the repetition never looks mechanical.
Look Development & Light
- Blender
- After Effects
Approach
The material is a slightly speckled plastic with a strong anisotropic sheen on the curled edges. Two coloured lights do the rest: blue from the side, magenta from behind, with a hard falloff into black. Depth of field is scene-based, which is what lets the macro still read as texture instead of pattern.
Visual Evidence & Process
The same scene at two distances: readable motif, then pure texture.
