Suzume

This is the second project where I took care of every single aspect. My main concern was to achieve the peculiar hand painted/anime look, so I mainly spent time on texturing and later on compositing my project in a short animation.  

First of all I made a reference board with everything I needed. My main inspiration for the final output was the bigger picture on the left since I wanted to create a different environment behind the door which actually acts as a portal between two worlds. Moreover, I found it enjoyable to add the little cat and chair that are chasing each other.

I used Maya for the modelling and UV part and the changed with Blender for the textures’ application, nodes that I needed to use and the rendering part. 

I created a dynamic water ripple with geometry and shader nodes and added a second plane with a caustic effect. Then I deformed the plane to simulate the waves. The clouds and the bushes are generated in a procedural way.

Between all the textures methods that I tried I chose to focus on these two below. For the first one I used the world space normal map that I backed as a base color and then manually painted my brush strokes using the color underneath. Last but not least, in Blender I applied the diffuser map and the color ramp to get the wanted shade.

On the other hand, for the second one  I created a material in Substance Designer, based on 3 different brushes, and then changed the parameters on Substance Painter.

Lastly I did the compositing part in After Effects and Photoshop, I added some details and made some adjustments to the colors, in order to achieve the result that I wanted.

I tried many different things with this project thanks to all the artists  who share their tutorial on the internet and I’m pretty happy with it, thank you for reading! See you in the next project!