These Disturbing 3D Animations Will Keep You Glued to the Screen
They are an unsetting mix of grotesque and mesmerizing, making you simultaneously repulsed, fascinated, and amused.
We know that today design can generate very immersive experiences in 3D. For us, following the development of 3D experiences and seeing and how much designers can push their boundaries is interesting and exciting. Because more and more is becoming possible with 3D art, creatives often push the limits of possible, making provocative art, or simply showing how far their skills can go. And sometimes the direction they take is a bit…dark.
We put together a list of seven 3D artists whose artworks aren’t quite the content you would normally find on your Facebook timeline.
As disquieting as these animations can be, they’re oddly satisfying.
You’ve been warned.
Erik Ferguson
Erik is a Norwegian artist who owes his fame to his weird animations. His interest in 3D animation arose while studying Media and Cultural Studies, in Edinburgh. After working for years at Bug — where he specialized in motion graphics, visual effects, and 3D animation — he decided to become a freelancer. His projects include big names like Guardians of the Galaxy and The Horrors, for which he designed the cover for the album “V”.
His creatures are anthropomorphic monsters, but also mishmashes of body parts, and even organs. What makes these figures so disturbingly realistic and believable is the texture of their tissues and muscles. This is particularly evident in the characters Rasch and Hairless Creature.
Erik also features more explicit and provocative content that gives his art a dark twist. For example, a video called Wake shows a pile of still naked bodies while a melancholic bagpipe melody plays in the background. Other times, his videos are provocative in a different, hilarious way. For instance, he created a video where a male member dances to the notes of Sh-Boom.
Oliver Latta
Oliver is a German graphic designer. However, he’s gained popularity thanks to his 3D artworks. In fact, his career boomed after he started experimenting with animation tests. A simple technical test can, in fact, become art. He opened an Instagram account to showcase his artworks, and in about two years he’s gained more than 800K followers. His fame got him international clients like Valentino and MSI Gaming.
His unique 3D animations feature humans and body parts. The all-pink palette, the use of bright colors, and the slow movements of his elastic figures make his artworks ethereal and non-threatening. But, once the viewer takes a better look, the candid exterior soon becomes a disturbing imaginary world.
Oliver’s art is not obvious. It’s ideated to make viewers ask themselves what he intended to communicate. The sensations that his ambiguous animations trigger are intentionally unpleasant; they aim at pulling the viewers out of their comfort zone.
Kouhei Nakama
Kouhei is a Japanese artist, working as Visual Art Director at WOW inc. He’s famous for the music videos Makin’ Moves and Makin’ Moves 2, where he combines animation with mathematical formulas. The human characters look rubbery and flexible, and they are distorted, twisted, and even broken apart and re-morphed together in synch with the catchy song’s beat. The effect is a surreal mix of limbs following geometric patterns, creating a human kaleidoscope. His projects include commericals for Fritz-Kola, Coca Cola, and Nike.
Kouhei’s 3D art also stands out thanks to the mesmerizing patterns and textures of his characters’ skin. Colorful hypnotic patterns materialize on the skin, fast moving bubbles come together to compose a human face, neon light motives illuminate under the surface of the skin, and worm-like creatures form bodies.
The viewer, who is fascinated by the perfection and quality of the animations, can’t help but remain bewitched. At the same time, the realism of some crude elements causes a feeling of disgust and unease.
Eamonn Freel
Eammon is a multimedia artist with a background in Photography based in London who specializes in 3D, animation, motion graphics, and sound design. He started his career as a self-taught artist, but today he can count clients like VICE, and BBC.
One of his latest disturbing project is a GCSE vlog in which a girl called Millie tells all about school life. The unfinished render of the model’s hair, together with her whispered voice, makes the character unsettling and creepy.
Eamonn also worked on a project called Cosmetic Tag Tournament, where the characters look like they were taken from a videogame. Even here, unfinished renders give his art a dystopian feeling. The same feeling is conveyed by another of his projects, an AI fashion brand made in collaboration with Max Siendentopf. Everything, from the models, to the slogans and the typefaces is AI generated.
Steve Smith
Originally from Michigan, Steve is an animator based in Los Angeles. His passion for animation started during high school led his to study Entertainment Arts in Detroit. His animations feature disjointed and surreal characters, which are absurd, dark, and with a sarcastic undertone. The reaction they often trigger is an awkward laugh.
One of his videos, Facelift, shows a head with a particularly long neck that undergoes a series of worrisome, but somehow funny, scenarios. The head has to go through weird treatments and procedures that deform, twist, fold, and deconstructs the head in uncomfortable ways. The juxtaposition of colorful and funny aesthetic versus the absurd scenarios is brilliant, making the video look like an ad.
Hayden Zezula
Originally from Texas, Hayden is a 3D artist and self-taught animator based in New York. Known as “zolloc” on Instagram, he produces monochromatic endless looping GIF art. He’s worked on several projects for renowned brands like Vans, WIRED Magazine, and MTV.
His hypnotic artworks bring the viewer into a nightmarish dimension, made of vivid colors that contrast with his dark imagination. His GIFs feature universes within universes, morphing limbs, mashups of moving body parts, human clones, and pulsing geometrical shapes. Each GIF is a miniature journey into a familiar but, at the same time, eerie world that makes the viewer feel uneasy.
Cool 3D World
Brian Tessler and Jon Baken are the two artists behind Cool 3D World. Brian, who is a composer, started in 2012 by making a music video. He only developed a visual aesthetic later, when he began experimenting with GIFs and images. In 2015 he started Cool 3D World together with Jon, and now they can count projects for famous brands like Balenciaga, VICE, and Tommy Cash.
Cool 3D World is a universe filled with glitchy graphics, haunting sounds, and surreal animations that leave a profound and unsettling sense of confusion in the viewer. Nothing seems to make sense, the scenes are deliberately abnormal, grotesque, and absurd. Anything can happen, it’s a virtual nightmare. And it’s hypnotic.
One can really expect anything from these videos, from a flying giraffe settling down with a man, to monstrous humans with extra pepper-like body parts. In fact, many videos are preceded by a warning saying “this video may be inappropriate for some users”. And despite they are disturbing and often gross, people can’t stop watching them.
In the end, these videos come across as open-ended streams of consciousness, animated with precision, existing only to push the boundaries of the artists’ creativity and skill.
