Vibrant Building Technologies

2025 · Full-time · Creative Specialist (3D, animation, film, print)

A year as Vibrant's only in-house creative: 3D product and UI animations for its Instagram launch and its booth at the International Builders Show (IBS) in Las Vegas, alongside its crowdfunding film, its website hero and its print. I modeled procedurally in Blender's Geometry Nodes so a single rig could drive every scene; parametric controls swap geometry, data, and shaders on demand. Ventilation is something people notice only when it fails, so I kept the renders realistic and added diagrammatic elements wherever the mechanics needed explaining.

Crowdfunding film

I scripted, shot, edited and animated the StartEngine film above myself. The script was the hardest part: it went through several rounds of revision with StartEngine and its lawyers so that no claim went unsupported at a time when the product was still under development. The campaign cleared its first stage: the $200,000 in pledges StartEngine requires before a raise can open to the public. Vibrant withdrew it before it did.

Behind the scenes of the StartEngine interview: a man seated in an open-plan office with brick walls and pendant lamps, lit by a large black softbox, facing a camera on a tripod with a monitor, a camera slider and a boom microphone set up around him.
  • The old KAYAK HQ
  • SmallRig RC450B key w/ softbox and grid
  • MKH-416 on shock mount boom
  • RC450B hair light
  • Alex, say hi
  • Trusty Zoom H6 from ten years ago
  • Sony a6300 on motorized slider
  • C-stand with sand bag
  • Sony a7III with teleprompter
  • Atomos Ninja V monitor
  • $90 tripod that's lasted forever
  • Friction arm from Christmas when I was 13
The talking-head setup for the StartEngine film, featuring gear I've accumulated over the years.
Wireframe of the scene at 1:23 in the StartEngine film. Here I move the lattices and curve scaffolding out of shape so you can see the airflow rig.

Visually, the hardest stretch was the pitch’s ambitions for electrical and water systems. I used the app and a blue-orb motif to segue into the other mechanical systems. The ERV’s airflow and the MERV-16 filter catching particles run on a particle system I built in Geometry Nodes rather than Blender’s usual emitter, which kept the level of detail under my control.

Website

I directed, choreographed, shot and composited the homepage hero for vibrantbt.com. It was a last-minute shoot, so I had people catch up with each other while I filmed, keeping everyone patient and natural.

Product renders and print

3D render of the Vibrant Air ERV: a textured charcoal housing with two steel ducts rising from it, mounted to a brushed-metal column.
Vibrant Air EP10. Exported from SolidWorks as STL, and remodeled wherever components suffered from dense tris.
3D render of a Vibrant filter cartridge floating in the gap between two cut metal columns, its mesh lit by a violet LED strip and the Vibrant mark glowing on its face.
Filter module. Cycles render.
3D x-ray render of the earlier EP7 unit: a black housing seen through, with amber and blue airflow lines running down its two ducts and fanning through the core, and the Vibrant mark glowing on its face.
The EP7, before the redesign.
3D render of the Vibrant Air ERV in black with its logo glowing blue, beside a filter drawer sliding out of a duct lit with blue LEDs, and a phone showing the Vibrant app: no HVAC issues detected, filter at 94%, and readings for temperature, humidity, radon and CO.
Sent to leads right after IBS 2025, made in half a day from a mechanical-room scene I kept on the latest design rev. The phone screen is a Figma export lit with an emission shader.
Vibrant Air banner: the headline 'Vibrant Air — Setting the new standard of Healthy Homes' with icons for AI, IAQ, MERV-16 and UVC, beside a cutaway render of the unit's airflow and the app's control screen.
Six months later, the update to every lead on app development and the EP10, whose housing moved from injection-molded plastic to EPP at a major cost saving.
Front of the business card: an x-ray render of the Vibrant Air unit with yellow, blue, red and green airflow lines running through it, the Vibrant mark at the center and 'Vibrant' set large across the bottom.
The IBS 2025 business card, front and back, built from animation stills alongside the booth video and weekly Instagram posts.
Back of the business card, reading 'own your air.' over an exploded render of a device's components trailing red and blue light, with a QR code and vibrantbt.com.

Animation

An excerpt from my first animation pitch for Vibrant, made in five days: the air followed through a cross-section of a home.

Each animation below took roughly five days. The hardest element was the shader-driven airflow through the ERV core, sculpted with a series of lattices to read like CFD without running a physics simulation. The UI animations ran long because the app was still being designed, so I made them procedural: every scene could be quickly retimed and reused as the app changed. The one live-action film in the grid, Field Install, I directed and shot run-and-gun on install sites, blocking the installers’ work for camera and calling retakes.

The Blender Geometry Nodes tree for the control sliders animation: dozens of nodes wired together in labeled frames, including source object arrangement, each slider background tile, cylinder proximity with line, and text and number figures.
The Geometry Nodes tree behind the Air Control Sliders reel below. Beyond letting me rapidly reorder the UI sliders, proceduralism means elements such as the displayed number and the line bump are driven just by animating the white circles.

2025 · product reveal

2025 · airflow visualization

2025 · data visualization

2025 · ui animation

2025 · behind the scenes

2025 · filtration explainer

trade show appearance

The Vibrant booth at IBS 2025, with my video on loop behind the demo. We left with 500 qualified leads.
A glass-sided PC tower lit blue and violet, with a Corsair liquid cooler, G.Skill memory and a GeForce RTX graphics card.
I was given permission to build my own workstation for rendering and editing. The RGB adds 200 CUDA Cores.