My 3D render of "今昔" - "Past and Present" artwork of artist Mika Pikazo. Original Artwork : https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/103633322

Mika Pikazo's works are awesome, their artworks are among the most beautiful, eye-catching out there. Matching their work 1:1 is a tall task for anyone, but I wanted to choose a high ceiling to see where I can push Blender's NPR style so here I go making a study out of their work in 3D.

Blender's Eevee have a "Shader to RGB" node and Lineart Modifier, which allows creations of stylized artwork. I want to see how far I can push the render engine so I choose an artwork to make a 3D study of.

I did my best to match the original artwork to see how close I can approach it, obviously most work would be faster and more accurate to paint in the texture; but making a celshade painted character is not my goal, I wanted to make a stylized character with minimal painting involved and all shadows and SSS will be handled by the render engine.
The end result is somewhat similar to PBR workflows : base color, roughness, metalness, SSS and all that; then light the scene using lambs in classic method rather than spending hours on textures that don't work well with animations. The final character is made of a few base color texture, the rest is handled by the render engine so she will work better with animations.

To fully utilize the 3D aspect I made a small animation to showcase the character : particle system for petals, cloud matching the beat of the song, movements of the girl, changing lights. I'm no animator, but a video do a much better job showcasing this character than some renders.

Along with the recreation in 3D or Pikazo's artwork, I made a few more render in 3D stylized way to showcase her in 3D ; and included the renders of lineart made by Eevee which I think look awesome. A video showcasing elements of this work can be found in the post.

Character Base body sculpted in Zbrush, textures such as Eye and Skin base color painted in Photoshop, Blender for modeling, shading, animating everthing else.

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