Japanese suburb (unity)

Megacorpse

LATEST UPDATE :









Hello guys, this thread will be dedicated to my next personal project, a japanese suburb street from the WataMote! anime. I really dug the simplified art style of the backgrounds and the general mood and decided it was time I tried myself at an outdoors scene. This will also be my first take on foliage which I expect to be a challenge.

I intend to show the street on different times/weathers (at least noon, dusk and rain) based on scenes from the anime. Here are some of the many reference screenshots I took :









Now I've been on this for two days and so far I've modeled most of the main character's house (since it has the most scale/prop references).





Based on what I've done I now have a good idea of the assets I will need and the space I'm going to allocate to the rest of the houses (I'm aiming for a lot of modularity obviously).
Next step I'm going to build a rough blockout of the rest of the scene and start detailing from there.

I'll keep posting any significant progression regularly as I just graduated from internship and have a lot of free time right now. Thanks for passing by and giving some advice!

Rawbert

this reminds me of shin-chan lol, keep it up

Joltya

Exciting! I think the most important thing for this would be getting the lighting to be extremely impressive, as that would sell the mood the most.

Check out this video and see if you can replicate the effects:

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwEuSxAEXPA[/ame]

Megacorpse

Joltya wrote: »

Exciting! I think the most important thing for this would be getting the lighting to be extremely impressive, as that would sell the mood the most.

Check out this video and see if you can replicate the effects:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwEuSxAEXPA

Interesting. I'll have to look into that, considering I'm on Unity that's probably gonna be a pain to reproduce, but it would definitely look great on this scene.

Update with a general spacing layout :



I find that I tend to enjoy detailing house after house rather than a more global progression, so here's the second house :



And here is a hedge where I tried to reproduce a technique from the game Airborn (http://simonschreibt.de/gat/airborn-trees/), so far I'm pretty satisfied with the way it looks.



Looking at direct references from the show, only the main house seems to have a constant design from episode to episode, so I've been gathering references from pre-fabricated suburban japanese house design and getting a lot of ideas. More houses with varying designs to come, then some flats in the distance, and I can start making foliage to fill the scene where it's needed.

Megacorpse

Update ! These are most houses finished (details like mailboxes and flower pots will probably come way later). I'll wrap this up with the flat's yard and move on to foliage next. There is yet an empty house space That I might use as a small tree square.

Megacorpse

First color attempts, these are only diffuse colors and normal maps. I'm going for washed out colors because the mood has to primarily come from the lighting. Foliage will stand out from the rest and be vibrant green. I can't wait to have a nice working shader for that!

Neelem

Looks really nice! Good luck with the foilage looking forward to it

future-fiction

I loved this show, so cool to see this recreated. What you have so far is looking really nice, would be good to break up some of the straight lines along the path with a few more probs, maybe some stray leaves from the foliage.
Agree with Joltya that the lighting is really going to sell it, the shadows are so blue in the screenshot, maybe try and get as close to that as possible in unity. Would be cool to see some of the camera lens effects too.
Have a look at how Shaft lights their street scenes for ref: http://anime-backgrounds.tumblr.com/post/48238996477/bakemonogatari-directed-by-akiyuki-shinbo-created

urgaffel

All your images are blocked by Barracuda at work with a spyware warning

Megacorpse

urgaffel : reuploaded all of them on imgur, I hope it works for you now. Added fog and noise to the scene along with minor color changes.

future-fiction : Thanks for the input, I hadn't thought of looking at that tumblr for more inspiration.
The blue shadows correspond to a morning mood that I may or not represent as one of the final shots, but it looks cool. I won't delve deeper in lighting until I have trees modeled and shaded, but yes, flares are also planned
What I like most about your references are the shadows cast on the road. Darker shadows from houses and trees would look pretty great on my plain gray street.

Also Watamote! makes clever use of perspective deformation, I'm going to see if I can give a slight curve to the street to break that straight line (I already have a subtle fisheye effect going on)

relaysignal

Hey! Interestingly enough, I've been trying to largely do the same thing, a recreation of suburban downtown Tokyo, specifically the Taito/Asakusa region.
I've got some small progress here.

Maybe we could combine forces!

Spoon

Having lived in Tokyo, this instantly read japan to me

nickcomeau

I agree with Spoon, definitely reads well as Japan! Can't wait to see how this ends up.

Swarm22

Not an anime fan but I love this. It screams Japan! Your lighting is perfect as far as i'm concerned. It looks like a cartoon

rbong obong

in anime or cartoons in general the surroundings take on the colour or the sky so if you could do that in unity it would definitely make your scene look awesome.

Megacorpse

Thanks for the motivating comments. Here's an update with a skybox and first foliage tests. I'll probably end up redoing that tree to make it look less blob-ish.





Also thanks to Elementrix for his inspiring work in that regard:

Megacorpse

Small update with dusk lighting. I still need to add more trees. Also more stuff laying on the road like those trashbags.

Megacorpse

Update ! Here are all weathers presets completed with their respective skyboxes. The dusk one may need some tweaking I think. Still need to fill out the scene quite more too.

Doxturtle

I really like this art style, its nice to see something that isn't just generic fantasy or realism.

cmc444

awesome looking so far. How did you go about your foliage work if you dont mind me asking?

Megacorpse

Doxturtle, cmc444, thanks! I tried to make an explanatory pic for the trees:

nickcomeau

I love the trees. What are you planning on populating the scene with?

atomander

This is really beautiful! Fascinating style.

PacoCasares

I love the trees. Looks amazing

mhofever

Dat tree. I love the stylisation of it.

Megacorpse

Thanks guys I'm calling the scene done now. Here are the final shots.
I'm moving on to the monthly hand-painted challenge. Critics are still welcome and I might address them later with a more global view.

Stavaas

That second to last picture looks phenomenal! The only thing I can adress on that one is that the lensflare might be too strong.

MattQ86

Yeah, the first and third ones look exactly like a screenshot from a show.

3dReaper

Holy shit... That looks like a still from an anime, especially the third.

You hit the nail on the head.

You need a black cat on the fence, highschool kids in uniform, a parked moped (Mostly joking).

What would really be icing on the cake would be little nods or easter eggs. A death note laying in the street with an apple next to it, Hei's mask from Darker Than Black (My avatar Pic), a dragon ball, The moon from Soul eater, or grafitti like

the ouroboros tattoo of the homonculi in FMA... etc

Yuchemey

Megacorpse said:

Thanks for the motivating comments. Here's an update with a skybox and first foliage tests. I'll probably end up redoing that tree to make it look less blob-ish.





Also thanks to Elementrix for his inspiring work in that regard:

Is there an tutorial for trees? cause all i can find are the real trees.

Yuchemey

Megacorpse said:

Doxturtle, cmc444, thanks! I tried to make an explanatory pic for the trees:

Yuchemey

Megacorpse said:

Doxturtle, cmc444, thanks! I tried to make an explanatory pic for the trees:



I tried using this method in blender. All i got was this : 
i forgot light map thou



any advice for a newbie?

VeryCrunchyTaco

This is so cool, loving the trees!  I also really like the night shot, stylization, and lighting effects.

I'm hoping to see more.  I'd also be kind of curious to see how it would look with more clutter in the streets, but am unsure if that'd work with the style/theme.  Keep it up, amigo!

Port-Seven

This is so nice to look at