Emerson Sanchez

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Personal Project

In good spirits

[ Date Created ]

March 2025

[ Creative Form ]

3D Art

[ Overview ]

In Good Spirts is a piece was aimed to replicate the visual style of Studio Ghibli's artwork. The goal was to maintain visual authenticity while maintaining fundamental digital design principles of modern 3D design. This project was aimed to improve my skills in geometry nodes, shading, sculpting and composition.

Final Output

Clay to Rendered view

Assets

01 · Optimization & Perspective

One of the main issues encountered in this artwork is trying to find ways to preserve detail along with finding opportunities to ensure it isn't too hardware intensive. Although is it is not a requirement to optimize a project if it isn't being used in large scale work, I like to find ways to reduce the amount of time rendering my works to make any changes in post-production software an easier experience.

02 · Converting Displacement Maps to a PNG

Mountains are created in GAEA and exported as displacement maps to allow for more control and visual quality. The mountains are then positioned in view of the camera and rendered as a png optimizing the scene.

Grass + Flowers (as IMG Planes)

03 · Grass

The grass was created with geometry nodes to not only optimize the scene but to also have controll over the various different assets found in the grass. The geometry node layout is a combination from two artist(s): Taiwan Sunflower & Trung Duyng.

Geometry nodes of the Grass and Flowers

04 · If I were to go back

This project should not have taken as long as it did. Ignoring my excellent ability to procrastinate, I focused way to much on trying to perfect the style. Although the composition is simple, it does not fully evoke the open and warm feeling of Ghibli films. Instead, I should have left room for improvement by experimenting or rendering out different scenes to understand the composition and visual intrigue of both 3D and Ghibli films.