This is far and away my most popular work published yet; made last spring for a discord server’s weekly theme, “Cozy.” I’ve decided the caterpillar’s name is Jackson, after the kind old gardener who introduced my sister and I to his summertime pests when we were little. (More like summertime pets, am I right?)

While considering whether to participate in the challenge, I went looking for a tutorial for knitting with geometry nodes (thinking I could make a joke about a granny getting carried away making cozies for everything). But instead, I found Erindale’s tutorial on UV-based procedural knit textures and wanted to test it on something more complex than a square plane. And then there was a tomato hornworm.

It was a fun puzzle combining armature, object, and shape key animations to get a slightly hacky knit loop together in a week. The only things I added after the deadline were sound design (self-recorded foley and CC0 nature sounds) and an improvement to the loop of the modified Unsplash image from Matteo Silvestri in the background.

Proudest moments so far:
A weaver on Twitter who had tried to learn knitting before, for whom the theory clicked while watching this loop.
The surprise of getting an honorable mention in the challenge, and the judge’s heartfelt appraisal of it: “This one is disgusting…but darn cozy.”

Video description under the cut.

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