Watch This Blender Animated Short Film With Scavengers Reign Vibes

Kay Hilman has unveiled NOXIOUS.

NOXIOUS is the 2024 graduation film by Digital Artist and Motion Designer Kay Hilman, created at HKU, featuring a soundtrack and sound design by Mikael Umarov. It's seriously gorgeous, with amazing compositions and beautifully stylized shaders.

To achieve this distinctive look, Kay combined hand-painted textures, Blender's Outline modifier, and a few "geo-node tricks to get lines to stick on surfaces". If you're curious about the technical workflow, rendering setup, or asset creation behind the film, let Kay know in the comments. If there's enough interest, he'd love to put together a behind-the-scenes breakdown video.

"Creating this short was an intense journey of exploring the boundaries between technical artistry, custom workflows, and cinematic storytelling within Blender. For a long time, the pressure of releasing it held me back, but looking back at what I accomplished, together with help from other artists, in such a short production window, this film deserves to be seen."

Kay Hilman is also the co-founder of creative design studio DOT4, and we previously got a chance to talk with the team about how they made a BoursoBank ad using Blender:

In case you missed the news, Blender 5.2 LTS is out now, bringing experimental Geometry Nodes-powered physics, a bunch of new nodes, a Thin Wall mode, a new Texture Cache system in Cycles, and much more.