Learn a polygon-modeling tool. The obvious choice is Blender, but Houdini and Cinema4d are also good alternatives if you're willing to pay up. Learn the basics

Learn a polygon-modeling tool. The obvious choice is Blender, but Houdini and Cinema4d are also good alternatives if you're willing to pay up. Learn the basics, a little bit of sub-division modeling (it'll take a month of youtube tutorials to get that down), a little bit of particles work, a little bit of lighting setups, a little bit of generator/matrix/cloner functions, flow fields and forces, etc. in your chosen modeling tool. When you have this down, dive into programming -- Blender and Cinema4d can let you do a lot with python coding and geometry/scene nodes; likewise for Houdini but with a custom DSL called 'Vex'. And that's where a lot of magic is done. If you're a particularly talented programmer, you can skip that part and write your own ray-tracing code like Michl (https://www.instagram.com/iamasoyboy/ https://www.instagram.com/iamasoyboy/) or otherwise do 2d-stuff like Tyler: https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2020/flow-fields https://tylerxhobbs.com/essays/2020/flow-fields Keep exploring and checking out what others are doing. There's r/generative: https://www.reddit.com/r/generative/top/?t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/generative/top/?t=all et al. for inspiration. In comments, artists will more often than not share the code they use to come up with their art.