Project deep dive: Making a 2D/3D animated star map

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This pack contains all my real-time process videos from June 2024.

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The theme for this month's series is "using geometry nodes as a complete beginner"

I want to challenge myself more and learn new things, so I've been diving into the Blender topic that scares me the most: geometry nodes! And it's been a cool (sometimes frustrating, mostly exciting) journey so far.

For this first month, the node setup is pretty simple (not surprising). I've used instances to turn individual grease pencil objects into flickering stars. I've created both a 2D star plane, but also a rotating 3D sphere of stars.

What I think is especially fun is getting to combine geometry nodes with my usual grease pencil tricks, so I've also done a lot with modifiers (build, noise, dot-dash), textures, and I've been rendering with my usual painting method.

Video 1: getting everything set up (1 h, lots of narration)
Video 2: 2D painting with grease pencil (2h, silent)
Video 3: how I finalized everything (15m, lots of narration)

.blend files are included at different stages of my process. All videos can be downloaded.

I hope you enjoy this mix of tutorial and .blend file breakdown!