Perry Cooper is a 3D artist originally from London, now based in the US, and co-founder of the digital production studio The Confessional. In his own time, he creates seamless, satisfying loops that have built him a following on Instagram and YouTube, opening some unexpected doors along the way. We caught up with Perry to talk about how he got his start, his favourite projects, where AI fits in, and why Drop & Render remains an essential part of his workflow.
From Cinema 4D to The Confessional
How did you first get into 3D, and how did that develop into a career?
At university, I was studying film, but I found myself drawn much more to post-production and working behind the scenes. That led me to find Cinema 4D, specifically a free disc on the front cover of a computer magazine. Compared to other 3D software at the time, its UI felt much more visual and far less intimidating to pick up.
Around then, an interactive 3D and video piece I collaborated on was selected for a film festival in France. We got to go on a bit of a jolly off the back of that, and I thought, well, maybe this is something worth pursuing.
After graduating, I joined an agency specializing in online advertising and digital marketing as a junior designer. That was where I started finding real-world applications for 3D. We’d occasionally need visuals we couldn’t source easily, and I offered to build them in Cinema. I convinced the agency to buy a license, and as the work grew, we brought on more designers who used Cinema or wanted to learn 3D. I worked my way up at a few agencies until around 2009, when two colleagues and I branched out to launch our own studio, The Confessional.
Personal experiments and unexpected opportunities
What keeps you making personal experiments alongside your commercial work, and how have those experiments created new opportunities?
3D is my hobby just as much as my career. Outside normal work hours, it’s genuinely what I enjoy doing: figuring things out, devising little solutions, or creating creative problems for myself and working out how to solve them. Because we weren’t doing 3D all the time at work (there's a lot of video production, ad builds and motion graphics also) I started sharing my personal experiments and tests on Instagram.
At first, I was just making stills to keep the momentum going. Gradually that turned into a daily habit, and I transitioned from stills into animation. I also brought Octane into the mix around then. As I pushed the quality, the renders naturally grew bigger and took longer.
In the early 2020s, the digital art space exploded with NFTs. I was already posting daily renders and looping everything I made, which caught the attention of digital marketplace Nifty Gateway. It was completely new territory for me, but after a couple of conversations to wrap my head around it, I saw the potential and jumped in. I put together six pieces of playful looping teapots. When the collection went live, every piece sold out within minutes. It was an incredible, surreal moment that really opened my eyes to what was possible for independent digital artists.
Realizing I could earn a living from the exact looping artwork I wanted to make anyway, was incredibly exciting. It bought me the time to tackle more involved, ambitious pieces than a typical daily render allowed. That opened up further drops across platforms, which eventually evolved into physical gallery exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Germany, and beyond.
Away from NFTs, I’d still continue to make looping animations for fun. You put work out there, and you never quite know what doors it will open. What feels like a random test to you might resonate with someone else entirely. For instance, during one of the "36 Days of Type" challenges on Instagram, I was posting a letter or number every day. An agency saw it and reached out because they wanted letter-based visuals for an Amazon social campaign, and I ended up creating a full series for them.
Sharing the process
You’ve shared tutorials as well as finished animations. How did showing your process become part of your work?
I used to regularly share tutorials on my YouTube channel, Perry Cooper 3D, covering all sorts of Cinema 4D workflows. Mostly focusing on specific modelling and animation techniques. For instance, during one of my daily letter series, I would record screen captures as I worked so there was a dedicated video breaking down the build process alongside each finished loop.
I genuinely enjoy making tutorials, but there’s a massive amount of behind-the-scenes effort involved. Over time, finding the hours to produce them alongside commercial and personal work became tricky, and I noticed the final renders consistently pulled in more views than the instructional breakdowns! Still, looking at my workflow opened some great doors, NVIDIA saw what I was doing and invited me to create a tutorial series directly for their channel, which was a fantastic project to be part of.
I’d love to return to doing more tutorials or technical breakdowns on the channel in the future when time allows, as sharing how things are built is still something I really care about.
Where creativity and technical problem-solving meet
Would you say you’re more of a technical person or a visual artist?
If forced to choose, I’ll be vanilla and take the middle ground and call it 50/50. Honestly, some days I think I lean more toward the technical side. I love tinkering and experimenting, and whenever a new tool or feature comes out, my first instinct is to poke around and see what it can do. While I usually have a rough visual direction in mind, the real thrill often comes from the problem-solving: How am I going to engineer this to loop seamlessly? How do I get this element to behave just right?
Depending on the project, there’s often quite a bit of maths involved. I find myself pulling up the calculator app all the time, working out frame counts, figuring out what's cleanly divisible, or calculating exact spatial offsets so an action resets cleanly.
A collaboration I did with another artist, ‘Late Night Renders’ is a great example. He animated a walking teapot character, and my job was to figure out how to have liquid continuously pouring out of it in a perfect loop. This was back before Cinema 4D had native liquid simulation, so I used RealFlow. To solve the loop without an obvious cut, I meshed a specific section of the pour, duplicated that animated mesh offset over time, and grouped the sequence into a Volume Builder so the seams blended smoothly together. Making it work seamlessly is half the fun!
The projects that stay with you
Which personal projects are your favourites, and what makes them stand out to you?
A lot of the ideas come directly from whatever’s going on in my life at the time. The baby-bottle series (Milk Monitor), for instance, came about right after my first child was born, simply because bottles and feeding were pretty much all that was on our minds day and night!
Along similar lines, Antisocial was a series exploring some of my thoughts on social media as an artist. To some extent, we can all suffer from the constant grind of self-promotion and the pressure to maintain a curated persona. I’m not saying that I felt antisocial myself, but the work was about highlighting the sense of isolation and disconnection that can easily creep in when you're constantly connected. Sometimes you just need to step away from the screen and touch grass.
Another series I have a soft spot for is Packaged Holidays, miniature vacation scenes enclosed in bags and suitcases. At the time it was during the pandemic, so everyone has their luggage at home - but only the dream of where it could take them. Manchester City discovered my work through a previous NFT drop, they loved the bag concept, so I created an entire bespoke series for them around Man City themes. They even produced a physical version of one of the bags with both our logos on it, signed by Erling Haaland. It was slightly surreal, but fun.
The animation 'Lost luggage' is probably one of my favourites. It’s driven by a single, continuous camera move, so dialling in the timing and orchestrating all the moving parts to sync up before looping back took a lot of planning. It also served as a bit of a last hurrah for my NFT work, it ended up being my final drop in that space. A fun Easter egg in that piece is that the textures on the background walls are my original concept sketches. I applied them almost like street graffiti, so the rough drawings I made while figuring out the idea became part of the final environment.
Family life, client work, and an immersive world in Geneva
What have you been working on lately?
Life has been quite full on since my wife and I had our second child. Any spare time I have seems to get swallowed up by DIY around the house, running around after the kids, and everyday family life. While I love it all, it’s easy to get in your own head when you step away from personal work. You can feel the pressure to constantly produce something, and that it must be brilliant right out of the gate.
Alongside family life, I’ve been fortunate to be kept busy with client projects through my studio, The Confessional. I feel very lucky to have a steady stream of commercial briefs keeping the team and me on our toes, even if it leaves less room for solo experiments.
Having said that, I recently finished an immersive installation project for a space in Geneva. There are hallways made of screens, leading into a space where the floor and walls are screens too. You're in the renders, basically! Much of the challenge was technical: figuring out the exact dimensions, getting the animation to loop seamlessly, and deciding on the overall duration. I leaned on Drop & Render to help output all the assets for it.
Now that things are settling into a bit more of a manageable rhythm, I’m actively carving out dedicated time again for personal artwork. It feels great to get back to playing, testing new ideas, and creating purely for the fun of it.
AI and the creative process
What’s your take on AI in creative work, and where do you see it being useful in your own process?
AI is here, and there’s no turning back the clock. All we can really do is figure out how to work with it or around it. Whatever your stance on it is, there are tools emerging that are genuinely useful, and it’d be crazy to ignore them entirely. The trick is making sure you don’t strip the actual creative heart out of the process.
Traditionally, we’d receive rough sketches or storyboards to kick off a brief. Now, we could be presented with AI renders right away, which blurs the line between an initial concept and a finished piece. If a scene simply calls for a man walking into a room, you suddenly find yourself debating the exact fabric of his socks. You want to say, hang on, we’re not even past the storyboard phase yet! You want everyone to buy into the core of the idea first before getting bogged down in surface details.
Connecting Claude to Cinema through MCP is the kind of thing I'm excited about. There are loops I've tried before that I abandoned because they got too complicated. Maybe I'd go back to one of those and ask for help getting it to work. Being able to reopen one of those projects and lean on the AI to help crack a problem or write a quick script for a repetitive task I’d otherwise have to repeat 500 times by hand, is brilliant. It’s an invaluable way of getting over that technical hump when you can clearly visualize a solution but get stuck in the execution weeds.
I’ve also been experimenting locally with ComfyUI. I’m not using it directly in commercial deliverables, but in client work, you never know what someone might throw at you next. Tasks like rotoscoping and generating clean mattes are massive timesavers. I once worked on a green-screen job featuring a furry puppet with physical control rods on the hands, and masking that out manually was an absolute nightmare. Having tools that eliminate that kind of time sapping work is a huge win.
At the same time, you have to be mindful not to get completely seduced by it. It’s cool and effortless to generate things, but it’s easy to spend hours tinkering and realize you haven’t actually created anything meaningful of your own. It does make me wonder a bit about the next generation of artists and designers. You still fundamentally need that grounding in manual problem solving, because the moment the model hallucinates or refuses to do what you need, you’re the one who has to fix it.
Exploring new tools
What are you curious to explore next in your own work?
One thing I keep meaning to explore is Redshift. I use Octane, but Redshift is so integrated into Cinema now that I'd like to learn it. I keep saying that's my next thing, then a project comes along and I fall back on Octane because I know it and it's the quickest way to get the work done.
Whatever happens, 3D is my safe space. That's definitely going to stay.
Growing an audience while staying true to yourself
What advice would you give someone starting out in 3D who wants to build a following on social media?
I’m not one to talk, but being consistent works best for me. I sound like a bit of a hypocrite, as it’s something I constantly have to remind myself to do. If you have kids, a demanding job, or just limited hours in the day, define a realistic timeframe you can genuinely stick to: one loop a week, two shorter tests, or one ambitious render a month. I’ve gone through periods of posting daily, dropping down to a couple of times a week, and then stepping back entirely. The algorithms shift constantly, so chasing them is a losing battle!
The best thing you can do is make what genuinely excites you. Don’t chase whatever trend is currently blowing up. My personal work has always been a creative outlet for things I find satisfying or funny. If people connect with it, that’s brilliant, but chasing validation will burn you out.
Showing your working process is another huge asset. I love watching other artists break down how they’ve tackled a scene or arrived at an idea. It’s often far more engaging than simply dropping a polished render with no context. Try following up a final piece with a short breakdown or screen recording of how you solved a specific technical challenge. Ultimately, you just have to get your work out into the world. Someone scrolling might spot a little detail, think it fits their brand, and drop you a message about an exciting brief.
On Drop & Render
What role does Drop & Render play in your workflow, and what keeps you coming back to it?
The reason I really like it is that it's so easy, and it just works. I know that sounds boring, but it's true. I downloaded it, installed it, and it worked straight away. I didn't have to jump through a load of hoops to get something to work.
On the rare occasion I have a problem like a plugin mismatch, their support team is right on it. To be fair, half the time the issue is on my end. You must remember to cache your simulations and bake your keyframes properly, something I tripped up on recently after coming back to a project after a bit of a gap!
With other render farms I’ve tried in the past, you often have to package everything up manually, compress assets, and upload through a web portal. Drop & Render lives directly inside Cinema 4D. You literally click a button inside your viewport, and off it goes. I can walk away, put the kettle on, make a coffee, and when I come back, the sequence is ready. What more do you want?
Selected client work
Find Perry online
- Website: perry-cooper.com
- Instagram: @perry__cooper
- YouTube: @PerryCooper3d
- X: @perry__cooper
