A Streetscape Project

This is a personal project that started at the tail end of My Kombi Project. I was meandering through tumblr and stumbled upon an artist under the handle of mochipanko , I was instantaneously obsessed with the vibe of her works, she somehow manages to capture those quiet, peaceful, slice of life moments that is mostly only ever seen in Japanese animated media. So I asked for her permission if I could recreate one of her artworks and thankfully, she said yes.

So off I went, challenging myself with a larger environment and balancing a 3D reinterpretation of such a flat 2D style. I faffed around in Maya, creating the scene and one thing I noticed was how hard it was to recreate something that wasn’t based on a real camera. I was limited to creating some of the weird proportions on buildings just to compensate for perspective. Many of the signs ended up being made from scratch and was referenced off of Chinese restaurant signs instead of the original’s Japanese.

Skip to 2020, I’m now a Master’s student at Animal Logic Academy (surprise!) and a cool thing that they’ve decided to do this year for my cohort was to assign Fridays as “Self-Learning Fridays”. Around the same time that this was implemented, I had started following Olof Storm and from there I broken down his processes and translated it to my own rolodex of programs at the studio. So I took it upon myself to elevate this project by taking it through Nuke and doing a parallax effect. Bear in mind, it had been 3 or so year since I’d last touched Nuke so there was some real resistance in trying to re-learn it. On top of all this, I tried my hand at 2D animation through Photoshop (not the most official or efficient way) for the smoke.