Kay Hilman, creator of the Blender-made short film NOXIOUS, and Co-Founder and Art Director at DOT4 Studio, offered a behind-the-scenes look at his new project, Factory & Bricks, crafted in his signature style. 

Hilman explains that in this new personal project, he explores an update to his NPR workflow, using the latest Geometry Nodes and Grease Pencil features. The artist shared two videos on the new environment, covering creating it from scratch, using Blender to lock down camera perspective and lighting, the line art, and dialing in the colors:

The second video focuses on a section of the illustration and demonstrates a new 2D-to-3D workflow in Blender 5.2, covering non-destructive Geometry Nodes primitives, screen-space line thickness using Geometry Nodes, and hand-drawn surface details with Grease Pencil:

Hilman previously developed a custom Grease Pencil workflow that combined projection mapping for his 2024 graduation short film, NOXIOUS. To create its visuals, he used hand-painted textures, Blender's Outline modifier, and "geo-node tricks to get lines to stick on surfaces." You can check out the details in a breakdown:

And here's the film itself:

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