Illustrations

As an illustrator myself, I always look for a way to improve my illustration work. 3D models in this session are meant to be used in a drawing software called Clip Studio Paint. The software does not have a system of LODs like in game engine. The models need to look good when zoom in still. Therefore even though the polycount would still need to be in control, I do need to put more than what a 3D model for game would require.

Link to my profile on Clip Studio Paint asset store

Lotus Lake Scene

I would like to do something related to my Vietnamese culture. It would be dreamy to have a setting like a lotus lake to place a character. However this is a daunting task to draw every single lotus present in the scene. An illustrator could use premade stamp brushes to stamp the lotus and therefore they can save time as well as improve efficiency. But this method also comes with a challenge, the lotus flower stamps often only work in one perspective. To draw such scene in another perspective, the artist will need to look for another set of stamps or even create their own stamps in the required view. This is a situation I feel like having a 3D scene would help out greatly.

Some bacgrounds created from this 3D scene.

Process of creating a lotus lake scene

Although the final scene is assemble in Blender, I have created more than half of the components in Houdini.

Modeling Lotus

To make it easier to handle and arrange the scene, I decided to create 3 lotus clusters then copy and paste them to populate lotus on the water surface. This task is broken down into creating variations of lotus leaves and lotus flowers. One could approach this task by manually model each variation of leaf and flower but I decided to create the models procedurally with Houdini. I also enjoy being able to go back in the nodes and make necessary change. I first attempted to create the lotus flower with the set up from Danny Lausens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUajIqvl6H4&t=1s&ab_channel=DannyLaursen . This set up introduced me to the natural pattern of leaves and petals arrangement phyllotaxis. The flower HDA uses vellum simulation AKA cloth simulation so the petal is deformed naturally. I crafted the lotus leaf HDA myself. Basically it is a long rectangular plane which is bend 360 degree into that circular shape. This allows me to use one normal square texture for all the leaves that is generated. I save the geometry of leaf and flower variations to the disk and imported them again for further process. The stalk of leaves and flower is also be done procedurally, which are spline with random bend controled by a seed value. the leaf or the flower is copied to the point on the top of each stalk. This point is grouped by curveu value from the Resample node. The lotus cluster is done by scatter random points on a circle, then lotus flower and lotus leaves are copied to those points, I use Intersection Analysis node to eliminate overlapping. This method can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp-VjCHTrzo&ab_channel=HoudiniSimon .

Boat

There is nothign special about the process of making this boat, I just look for some references and model it manually in Blender. The tip is to create the biggest shape first. This shape is duplicated and cut to create smaller detail which follow this big shape. The result is a neat boat with each parts fit perfectly to each other, maybe too neat but illustrator can easily paint over this asset if that bothers them. Unlike lotus, in this scene, there is only 1 boat. There is no need to UV unwrap this since I planned to use solid colour.

Water surface

The water surface itself is just a plane with a texture on it. To create a smooth transition, I use alpha channel to mask the border of the water plane with a radial gradient. A Perlin noise is also mixed in this mask to create more interesting transitions of colour. The water texture is done in Substance Designer.

Since there is no water physics could be used in Clip Studio Paint, I models the shape of the waves surround the boat. I attempted this by creating concentric circles curve then scatter a few points on those curves, copy spheres with random size to the points and use those sphere in Boolean subtract operation to cut those curves randomly. A mountain node is used to apply noise on the P attribute of the points of the curves in X and Z axis to make it wavy.

Butterfly

It's rather simple to create butterfly. First of all, I draw the silhouette of the butterfly in white on a back background, this allows me to use Trace node in Houdini to create this geometry, this can be remeshed and transform to create different state of wing flapping. And copy to point to create a cluster of butterfly

Bakery Scene

3D model can also be easily inserted to an existing background.

This scene was created as I need a bakery scene for my planned visual novel game and it happens as there was no bakery on the Clip Studio Paint asset store.

Process of creating this bakery scene

Preparation

I looked for several bakery photo references, I have an image in mind, a cozy place. Next, I need to come up with a list of required assets. This can be done partially by looking at reference and see what kind of objects in there. I also do a quick block out in 3D to see what I actually need for the scene.

General process

There is no special procedure for making 3D model for this scene. I manually model everything in Blender. My advices for creating such scene is to start from big structures first then move to smaller details later. There are a lot of duplicate object in this scene, therefore, only one copy needed to be model and the rest can be instances. I recommend instancing objects instead of duplicate them just in case you would need to make change to the design, when you make change to the original object, all the instances automatically change, this will not happen for duplicated objects.

One thing that makes this 3D model looks like an illustration is hand-painted textures on the object. I create a few textures by painting them in Procreate. The textures are not seamless but they are organic looking with chalk and pastel brushes strokes. Their size also needs to be quite big. When I UV unwrap the 3D models, I will manually place each UV island on the texture to control how it looks. This results in 3D model that looks like an illustration when the material is unlit, which makes it great to use in Clip Studio Paint. Seams could be visible, but since this model meant to be used for a drawing application, the artist always can rotate the model and pick their best view.

Reuse the contents to create other iterations

An obvious of using 3D models is that the asset can be directly reused in another related context. I can quickly created a smaller bakery as well as a bakery cart.

Small Props

I hardly see proper 3D assets that require minimal processing on the asset store so I created a few myself. All of the assets below require almost no paint over.

Coffee drinks

Tea drinks

A few assets focus on Vietnamese culture which are collaboration between me and another artist, Moizuki. Moizuki provided the patterns while I did the 3D modeling part.

Butterfly umbrella

testasset.mp4

Lanterns

lantern-illu.mp4

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