The Cutest Sakura Noodles Shop

Hi! I'm finally sharing the personal project I worked on for the 3D photorealism module at SkyUp Academy. 

Clay, wireframe, final render and a night view.

I took the majority of the references from a YouTube video where this kit was assembled. So, I took screenshots to study every piece.

It was an interesting process, so I'll show you a little bit of it!

After setting up the camera to be as close as possible to the reference, I started blocking out the model in Maya. The major problem for me was to understand how to create the flowers. I tried to sculpt one, but It wasn't the right method, the flowers were too many, so the polygons would've been an infinite amount. I had to find another way! At this point, my professor introduced me to the tool ''Paint Effects''. After many tries, I managed to comprehend how it worked and I modified everypart of it to create that effect. 

Since I became too affectionate with the flowers that I sculpted at the beginning, I still maintained some of them, in some parts of the roof and on the floor!

I really loved the result!

Some of my initial renders

After the modeling part, I proceeded to make the UVs and import everything but the plants and the flowers in Substance Painter. It started in a pretty stressful way for me, since it was the first time that I used that software. Thanks to a lot of help from the class's assistant, Mariagrazia Occhipinti, I discovered a lot of the potential of Substance Painter! 

I had so many types of woods to search up, and it was the biggest struggle to make it look good but also coherent. 

I admit that I hand painted the majority of the model, especially the lamp, the paper fishes, etc. based on the screenshot that I accumulated. I painted all of this parts on Procreate and projected them on the UVs as a base color image.

In this way, I had better quality images and project a clean version. I ended up repainting the lamp directly on Substance Painter, since, when I projected, it destroyed (to my regret). 

That's it! I then exported the textures into Maya, created the lights (which was not that easy!), and rendered. Here are some additional cute close-ups!

And yes, the deformity of the table is intentional, to fit the reference! hahah

Thanks for reading, see you on the next project!