Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many artists have had their mediums closed off to them. With the limitations set on production teams and the complex logistics of getting back on set, some artists have had to find new ways to express themselves — like Karl Poyzer, a director of photography who took the time during the pandemic to dive into 3D artwork in Blender, with the goal of having fun and doing things his own way. This track would not only allow him to develop a fan base and fresh style but also to start a short film series, Floaters, that won a Vimeo Staff pick due to its amazing visuals, efficient storytelling, and — most importantly — its British humor.

I got to chat with Poyzer about his journey of getting started in 3D, the development of Floaters, and his tips for getting started in 3D art. 

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Take me to the beginning. How did you get started?

As a kid, I was hugely into sci-fi and Star Trek and Star Wars. And as I was growing up, I was a little bit more of a polymath in terms of stuff that I did, like making music, how you play music, writing, and stuff like that. And then yeah, went to university and started film and then got into cinematography. And the thing for the next 10 years, it was just specializing in one creative outlet, which was a lot of fun. And it was really great, but that interest in sci-fi was always there and the storytelling element of it.

So tell me about your move into 3D. Did being a director of photography contribute to your exploration of this new medium? 

I think what’s been interesting is I was quite scared, as I started spending more time on 3D, that I wouldn’t be taken as seriously. We have a problem in the UK with people hyphenating their job roles. I don’t think this is bad in the US, but we get quite snobby about life. When people do multiple things, they can’t be doing any of them seriously. So I was quite worried about how directors see me and that I would not be taken seriously as a cinematographer, whereas I found my following has increased tenfold really. And I’ve got a lot of new relationships with new directors through doing this. 

I think the photography side of things gave me an advantage when it came to learning 3D because the lights work basically in the same way, but they are a lot cheaper. You don’t need to pay a crew overtime, and you’re not doing night shoots and all that. I think the thing that keeps me coming back to it, it’s just like that experimentation of those kinds of things and the storytelling of it. I’m not trying to be a full-time artist necessarily, so showing off art skills is something that I’m not bothered about. I’m more interested in whether a piece of art evokes some sort of story, whether it feels like there’s a story there or not. It was really nice when I first started putting stuff out when people were writing little bits of micro fiction and stuff like that. I’ve succeeded if it makes people feel like there’s room in there for them to put their own story.

Damn. That’s the dream. I can imagine that’s such a great feeling. People were just building out the world a little bit for you, and you’ve succeeded in giving them the bits that just spark something.

Yeah. I think there were loads of great artists out there who do work, that you can see the story, that where there are people doing things. There are things moving in specific directions or things blowing up and exploding, and the story’s all there and it looks amazing. And then there are us who do less of that. And my feeling is like my favorite artists are the ones whose landscapes are almost devoid of people. My goal is to allow people to be the people in those pictures. So I think that if you leave the story out, you allow the people who are looking at the art to have some of that story.

I wanted to ask a question about this. I read your Medium post on greebles [bits of details on larger objects that make them appear more complex]. So I definitely want to ask a question where you could just rant about them! 

Yeah, it’s exactly the same. I think people could maybe mistake my rant about greebles as a love of little things attached to spaceships, and it isn’t so much that. I think what I was trying to say was that putting things into your world, be them little bits of things sticking to the side of your spaceship to make it look more detailed or bits of story, I think they serve the same purpose. Is there a correlation between smoother spaceships and lesser stories? I don’t know, maybe. But I think in the ’70s and ’80s, you relied on that stuff a little bit more because you couldn’t just computer generate it. You couldn’t just show it, that things were a lot more difficult to do.

I think that limitation bred the need to expand your universe’s reach cheaply, and the cheapest way to do that normally was just have your character say something or allude to something that you don’t necessarily have to explore. Like the Kessel Run or the attack ships on fire from Blade Runner and stuff like that and the space jockey. There were all these nice little things, a lot of which have now sort of been explored and shown to us and they’re not ours anymore. It’s a shame really, nothing that they could have put on-screen would have been weirder than the sort of weird abstract thoughts that everyone had about what the space jockeys were.

I think it was such a beautiful thing that we got to have a little bit of ownership of, we were trusted with. It’s a shame that there isn’t more of that. I miss the strangeness, the lack of logic. And I think it’s why when people ask me what things do in my pieces, my answer is always, “That’s yours.”

So when you make a piece, what’s the guiding light as you assemble things?

I would say like 80 percent of what I make, I go in without a plan. I think the work I’m happiest with is work where I’ve gone in without a plan because it’s normally the strangest. It’s not always the case. Sometimes, especially if I’m working on Floaters, I’ll have to make a thing that’s a specific thing to do a specific thing. But yeah, with the art, the surrealism of it, I think I tend to not go in with a plan. And then at that point, it’s just about finding shapes of things that I think, “Oh, that’s interesting.” You can get carried away quite easily in 3D because you can just keep adding and adding and adding. And then all of a sudden, your thing doesn’t look good anymore. And then you’ve got to scale it back and it’s weird, like how wide do you go?

And that can sometimes be a battle. It’s a weird thing because I feel like a lot of the time, there’s probably only about an hour and a half’s worth of like if I was to remake, it would maybe only take me an hour. But sometimes it’s like four or five hours of just me looking at a thing. It started as a spaceship, then it became a building, and then it was a spaceship again. That process is a lot of fun. I use references and, obviously, I look at a lot of stuff on Pinterest and try and take as much. In the same way, we were talking about kitbashing and greebling. It’s the same thing. It’s like picking a little bit of that and a little bit of that and mashing them together and seeing what comes out.

How would you describe the relationship you have with your art?

That’s a good question. Would I describe it as an abusive relationship? Maybe I would. 

I get super excited when I’m making something. And it’s got to a point where I’m happy with them, “Oh, there it is. Let’s go down this road.” And I’m super excited to put it out and the dopamine hit of people liking it and sharing it. I’m very, very lucky to have my work shared quite a lot. I think being starved of that for 10 years in the film industry, I need that feedback. So the last couple of years in the film industry was just being slower and slower as the budgets got bigger. And it was just was longer and longer period of time between projects. I think it’s become a joyous thing to just be able to make it and put it out and be excited about it. But I do look back at them after a couple of days and then don’t like looking at them anymore. So I have a fling with each of them. 

How did Floaters come about?

It was a weird one. Although I’d been doing 3D for a little while, it was the first time I’d ever animated anything. So it was born out of restrictions really in that I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to animate people or do rigging or any of that stuff. So all we really had was the option to make things float and move up and down. So it was kind of a case of trying to work out how those limitations would become positives rather than negatives.

We stumbled upon this nice little idea where we just never see the inside of a spaceship and always just do everything from exteriors. That kind of became a selling point rather than a limitation. The design language is just a lot of fun. I think a lot of sci-fi can get quite serious, which I love, but it’s kind of nice to just undercut it with really dry British humor.

It turned out to be, I think by a country mile, the most popular thing either of us had ever done. And it was just sort of taking it not really seriously. I think it was an interesting exercise and just doing a thing that you feel like you could do well.

What would you say for people starting out their journey in art and 3D?

The hardest part of doing any of this stuff when you’re starting out is going back to it the next day. And you won’t go back the next day if you didn’t enjoy the day before. When you’re first starting to learn something, to get to a point where you enjoy it is really difficult, I had to start in a way that allowed me to sort of come back the next day. And I think that to do that, you have to find the way that you want to do it. 

To begin with, you’re going to cut corners and you’re going to do it wrong. You are going to do it differently. I always say this about Blender and having a small sort of Patreon of people who have Blender questions and making tutorials. I think a lot of tutorials are designed for people or made by people who went to university and learned how to do 3D properly from the very basics. Whereas like my approach was I came in sideways and I was like, “Look, this thing works if you do this, I don’t necessarily know why. I don’t know what its purpose is, but it works.”

It might take you a little bit longer, but you’re never going to learn the proper way if you’re not doing it in a year’s time, two years’ time. And that’s the real shame is that people give up. If there’s a way you’re making something you’re happy with and you’re going back to it the next day, you’ll learn all of the other stuff. If you’re enjoying it, you’re going back to it.

After three years of production, Ian Hubert, king of the one-minute Blender tutorial, has uploaded the first episode of his sci-fi series, Dynamo Dream. And it’s been worth the wait. The series is a mix of live-action and CGI that follows a salad merchant on a seemingly normal day through the dense streets of the Sunset District, a futuristic metropolis filled with fax machine drones, giant mutant crabs blocking traffic, and flying assassin bots.

The episode is visually stunning and seems to be endlessly filled with details. Every frame can be paused and observed, each containing hints to an expansive world that stretches beyond the camera’s frame. The world is convincing and surprisingly charming. 

While bearing resemblance to other gritty dystopias, the folky music, calm atmosphere, and moments of pause let you know that humanity isn’t totally lost in the world of Dynamo Dream. There are still small joys to be found in the hustle and bustle. This continues into the protagonist, a merchant with a green thumb who sells salads in mugs. She’s a flower growing out of the cracks of the concrete, though things may not stay peaceful for long. Hopefully it won’t take another three years to find out.

Over the years, Hubert has shared behind-the-scenes looks at this project and has become a well-known figure in the 3D art community — namely, for making impressive work with ingenious animation methods spotlighted in his Lazy Tutorials series on his YouTube channel. His videos show you how to make a lot out of a little, often in under a minute’s time. Even more impressively, all 3D models used in this series were created using Blender, a free 3D package. Compositing was done using Adobe’s After Effects. 

You can check out a few of those tutorials below and support Hubert through his Patreon, where he shares tutorials and 3D assets with his patrons.

As a visual artist who also makes beats in the anonymity of my bedroom, I’ve always wondered how Daft Punk managed to craft not only their music, but their visual presence. A masterpiece unto itself, the Daft Punk helmets transform two anonymous musicians into otherworldly beings. Arbiters of funk and electro. Ambassadors of sound. Gods of the synthesizer. You get it. The helmets allow the musicians to detach themselves from reality and bring the audience into their universe. It leaves the musician in mystery, and until today, the genesis of the helmets was a mystery to me too. 

In a tweet thread by @daft_wub, you can see the whole process from sketch to final, including electrical schematics and initial sculpts of the helmets. They also show the complex wiring that was required to power the matrix of LEDs, as well as behind-the-scenes images from Daft Punk’s very first photo shoot. 

The thread also credits the companies involved: Alterian Inc., which did work on the first version of the helmets, and Ironhead Studios, which worked on the latest and slimmest versions of our favorite funk bots. Both studios have experience in film; Ironhead Studios in particular has worked with Marvel on live-action costumes for characters such as Spider-Man, Black Panther, Thanos, and more. 

These images aren’t new; the tweet thread is simply recirculating them, but this is great for fans like me who’ve never really seen the process. If you want to learn more, I suggest reading this article by Piers Martin, based on an extensive 2000 interview of the duo originally conducted for The Face. You can even read a full annotated transcript.

And for bonus material, check out this video with Alterian SFX Designer Tony Gardner exploring various iterations of the suits. 

It’s been a rocky few years for multiplayer Star Wars games. In 2015, EA revived the Battlefront franchise only to deliver a beautiful but shallow arcade experience that didn’t require much skill. This was then followed up by an improved and expanded sequel, which only reached its full potential years after it was nearly immobilized by an industry-shaking microtransaction controversy. 

Despite this, Battlefront II turned out to be one of my favorite Star Wars games. It received a batch of updates that I believe made up for its rocky start and kept me coming back. These updates were mainly focused on ground combat modes, leaving Starfighter Assault, its space battle mode, to go without an update since launch. While it was a fun mode, it largely relied on its spectacle and speed over engaging gameplay. It was fast, fun, and dumb.

Star Wars: Squadrons, EA’s new combat flight sim, slows down the pace and replaces the mindless one-button abilities with intricate systems that require moment-to-moment decisions and long-term planning. The ability to manipulate these systems, like power distribution and shield allocation, can separate the good pilots from the great. 

Squadrons lowers the player count to 10, split between the New Republic and the Galactic Empire. Both sides allow players to select from four classes: the all-around fighter, the dedicated bomber, a speedy interceptor, or a team-focused support ship. Rebel ships come equipped with shields and generally have great visibility, which comes in handy in VR. Imperial ships, with the exception of the TIE Reaper, trade shields for the ability to immediately transfer power from one system to another, providing a complete laser recharge or full boost refill. They also have worse visibility, due to the classic TIE fighter cockpit design. 

Within each faction, the classes all have a distinct feel. Some are more maneuverable, while others give and take more damage. Modifications to your ship’s components can bend one class to mimic the role of another. You could outfit your fighter to be more effective against capital ships, or you could tweak your bomber to be more effective against other starfighters. 

These modifications always come with a trade-off, a theme that permeates throughout the rest of Squadrons. Every benefit has a drawback. In order to raise your top speed, you may need to sacrifice your overall health pool. This allows for a lot of personalization in your starfighters and really changes the way you play. Some loadouts may benefit from an aggressive mentality, requiring you to get in close and get out, while other kits allow you to move a bit slower and deal as much damage as you take. The variety of possibilities ensures that no two matches of Squadrons are exactly the same, and you have to be ready to adapt to any given situation. The starfighter with the steepest learning curve seems to be the support ships, which handle like big space boats and are a bit slower. 

The two main multiplayer modes in Squadrons are dogfights, a short team deathmatch-type game mode, and fleet battles, a multistage objective-based mode focused on taking down the enemy’s flagship. 

Fleet battles is the premier mode of Squadrons. Two teams go head to head with the ultimate goal of taking down the other’s capital ship. However, both teams must go through the other defensive line of fighters, corvettes, and frigates in order to make the final approach. Each side must work to boost their morale in order to push the frontline forward; each kill gives a morale boost, while each death takes some away. 

A fleet battle begins with an initial dogfight. This is where interceptors and fighters are handy. The winner gets a morale boost that propels them into the next phase, while the opposing team has to pull back and defend their frigates. These serve as defense structures and are extremely valuable. They keep the frontline away from your capital ship while also providing a resupply point during the attack phases. Losing one has real cost and can make attacking the enemy’s flagship much more challenging. 

The constant push-and-pull nature of this mode makes it much more engaging than the linear hand-holding of Starfighter Assault in Battlefront II. I found myself clenching my controller as our Nebulon-Bs were on their last legs, swerving my bomber around, setting full power to my lasers to take down the incoming corvette. I feel like I have agency over a battle and can turn the tide of the battle based on how well I play my role. 

Both modes are played on the same six maps, with size variations for the two modes. They offer great variety, and most of them provide excellent cover. In one round as a U-Wing, I led my team around an asteroid just above a Star Destroyer, using the squadron mask ability to hide our bombers from their scanners, setting us up for a perfect bombing run on their shield generators. In another round, I placed a turret mine around the corner of a debris field, just in front of our frigate, providing covering fire that would hit enemy bombers in their blind spot. There’s nothing quite like weaving through asteroids, dodging missiles, and laying mines around the bend for your pursuer to encounter.

That’s at the heart of what could make this an exciting esport: the potential for clever plays and team tactics. But whether this game has the steam to stick around is yet to be seen. After nearly 60 hours, I can feel the charm of the maps wearing off. With no upcoming content announced, I’m not sure moving up the competitive ranks would be worth grinding on the same maps over and over. 

Ranking has also been a bit of a hassle at launch. For one, if any player drops out of a game, your whole game immediately becomes invalid for ranking. You could leave the unranked match without impacting your competitive rank, but it would count as a loss on your pilot record. So you’re forced to play a whole match down one or more players or sacrifice your ratio hoping the next round is better. At this point, my ranking is completely bugged. As soon as I finished my qualifying rounds, my rank reset to zero and my end-of-round rank screen glitched, with XP counting up to infinity. These are understandable issues to have at launch, but it’s been a bit discouraging as someone eager to climb the ranks. 

Squadrons is the Star Wars game I’ve been waiting for. It challenges players and makes them sink deeper into its mechanics to improve. It maintains the spectacle of the Battlefront games while relinquishing control over the action to the player, raising the stakes for each strategy and decision. The big question is whether this game will have a prolonged life, especially in esports. EA continues to say that it has no plans for future content, so the future of Squadrons may be in the hands of the fans. Some are already forming their own tournaments, like the Calrissian Cup and Operation Ace. They may be Squadrons’ only hope.

If I had to sum up my condition over the last few weeks, it’d be exhaustion. I’m tired. I told a friend this week that my soul feels like it needs to hibernate. Not only in grieving for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade but also in viewing what feels like hundreds of accounts of hotheaded police officers violently attacking protesters who are demonstrating against police violence. Once again, I’m forced to confront the reality that I’m not as free as I’ve been led to believe. That our system is broken. That people want me dead, due to no fault of my own. 

Before, during, and after times of hardship, many in the Black community create art to take in the pain and struggle and release a beauty that heals and teaches. Black creatives are always working, trying to find some understanding, envisioning a better world. Some of my most pleasant moments in the past few weeks were when a close friend and I just listened to music. We sat in its energy, each new song reflecting on our reality. We’d jump from Erykah Badu to 21 Savage to Rico Nasty to Buju Banton then back around again. From R&B classics to trap to gospel. Each twist in the playlist turns a new page in our own stories. 

Here’s a selection of works that have been of service to me and some people to whom I think you should pay attention. Some of these I’ve loved for a while, other things I’ve only discovered recently. I hope you find something here that speaks to you or at least livens up your day. 

Noname
Instagram

Nikkolas Smith

Zouzouo Williams Obrou

BEAM
Instagram

Teddy Walton (Music Producer)
Instagram

Bryce Cobbs

Ciscero
Instagram

Gianni Lee

Ray Neutron
Instagram

Tierra Whack
Instagram

Smino
Instagram

Baby Keem
Website

Andre Nódoa

KOTA The Friend
Instagram

They Hate Change
Instagram

Angrygengars

Rico Nasty
Instagram

Kenny Mason
Instagram

Cary Fagan
Instagram | Puzzle Project (% to support Girls Who Code)

EarthGang
Instagram

Stina Aleah

Simpson
Instagram

Ari Lennox
Instagram

Ezra Claytan Daniels

Denzel Curry
Instagram

Shygirl 
Instagram

Leighton McDonald

Brandon Gastinell

JID
Instagram

Dave McClinton

Channel Tres
Instagram

Matt Mcghee
Instagram

Adé Hogue

Koffee
Instagram

JPEGMafia
Instagram

Zack Fox
Instagram

Lucky Daye
Instagram

Father Nico

D Smoke
Instagram

Flo Milli
Instagram

G.L.A.M.
Instagram

This past year The Verge launched an ambitious sci-fi series, broke stories that started conversations and forced change in industries, made our first zine, created interactive timelines, guides and a couple of straight-up video games. And for each one, we made a piece of art to carry the story through. So as New Year’s Day approaches, we’ve compiled our favorite illustrations from 2019, made by our art team and incredible freelancers.

If you want to see more beautiful work from The Verge, check out and follow us on Instagram @thevergeart. As always, our wallpapers page has original art for free download to put on your device. You can also head over to 2019: A year in photographs on The Verge to see the best of our photography from this year.

Online Reunion
Artist: Marcin Wolski

Monsters Come Howling in Their Season
Artist: Corey Brickley

Meet the scientists who are training AI to diagnose mental illness
Artist: Ana Kova

The god box: an oral history of Avatara
Artist: Jude Buffum

The Burn
Artist: Arik Roper

Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult
Artist: Alex Castro

Skin City
Artist: Deborah Lee

Move the World
Artist: Zoë van Dijk

Machine of Loving Grace
Artist: Benjamin Currie

The Trauma Floor
Artist: Corey Brickley

The World Wide Web turns 30: our favorite memories from A to Z
Artist: Alex Castro

Why companies want to mine the secrets in your voice
Artist: Cathryn Virginia

The armchair psychologist who ticked off YouTube
Artist: Alex Castro

Foxconn is confusing the hell out of Wisconsin
Artist: William Joel

How the Game Boy found a new life through emulation
Artist: Alex Castro

15 game streaming services you can try before Google Stadia arrives
Artist: Alex Castro

Redline
Artist: William Joel

Why’d You Push That Button
Artist: Martina Paukova

Apple and Amazon cut a deal that upended the Mac resale market
Artist: Alex Castro

It’s easier to donate your body to science than your medical records
Artist: Mark Pernice

Metadata is the biggest little problem plaguing the music industry
Artist: Alex Castro

Bodies in Seats
Artist: Corey Brickley

How William Gibson’s long-lost Alien 3 script became 2019’s most intriguing audio drama
Artist: Alex Castro

One year after Trump’s Foxconn groundbreaking, there is almost nothing to show for it
Artists: Amelia Holowaty Krales & Michele Doying

The Mormon Church vs. the internet
Artist: William Joel

Deaths and injuries don’t slow Uber Eats’ rapid expansion in Mexico
Artist: Alex Castro

Instagram ‘tag cleaners’ are fighting against digital vandalism
Artist: Alex Castro

They said you could leave electric scooters anywhere — then the repo men struck back
Artist: Jude Buffum

It’s Sentient
Artist: Ana Kova

Welcome to Lower Duck Pond, a fake town of 82,000 people
Artist: Meredith Miotke

Split Screen
Artists: Alex Castro & Michele Doying

YouTube shows have become a secret weapon for rising politicians
Artist: Selman Design

Faraday Cage
Artist: Alex Castro

Death Stranding: an explainer for Hideo Kojima’s inscrutable new PS4 game
Artist: Alex Castro

The everything town in the middle of nowhere
Artist: Laurent Hrybyk

How one company you’ve never heard of swallowed tens of thousands of text messages — then spit them back out
Artist: Alex Castro

Pirate Radio
Artist: William Joel

Dial Up
Artist: David Huang

The Last Stand
Artist: Alex Parkin

One of PlayStation’s most important studios makes games about loneliness
Artist: Alex Castro

How to fight lies, tricks, and chaos online
Artist: Alex Castro

PlayStation 25th anniversary issue
Artist: Alex Castro, Photography by Richard Parry

Emotional baggage
Artists: Grayson Blackmon & William Joel

The environmental impact of a PlayStation 4
Artist: Alex Castro

32 moments that made the decade
Artist: Alex Castro

The Terror Queue
Artist: Corey Brickley 

New Away leaks reveal employees worked without heat, struggled with headaches and nausea
Artist: William Joel