How to Create a Ghibli-Style Warm Environment with Hand-Painted Texture

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Abhishek Maity. I am a 26-year-old 3D Artist and Mentor from Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Games, animated movies, and visual FX are the things that have always excited me from my childhood; I always leave questions about how it happened or how they did this kind of stuff! After practicing different types of art styles manually, I began studying 3D Art in 2018 through a course. However, after creating different kinds of props, in 2021, I have gained interest in 3D Environment Art. I've created several original projects since then.

The Inspiration behind the Ghibli Environment Project

I mostly start with a basic reference picture, and this time, it was the famous wallpaper from the movie "Arrietty" (2010) by Ghibli Studio. I wondered how it would look in 3D with a hand-drawn Ghibli effect — that is how I came up with the idea of making it into 3D. Here is the reference picture:

Modeling

I have created different types of texture through nodes, but for this Ghibli Environment, I tried to break the method and continued with the hand-painted texture — my initial composition or mindset for this artistic Ghibli project is to create a hand-painted texture style.

I have created the main blockout and the main assets modeling part in Maya using the basic modeling tools. While doing the modeling part, the most important point is to make the mesh in quads with a good edge flow. The UV part is also done in Maya.

After the basic modeling, I exported a few assets into ZBrush for some simple sculpting, which could make the texture more lively after the high-poly to low-poly baking. In ZBrush, I just used the Clay Buildup and Flatten Brush to sculpt the edges.

Texturing

Texturing is the key to this project, so I have spent a little more time in texturing than usual. I have used Substance 3D Painter for the hand-painted texturing effect. First, I did the high-poly to low-poly baking to get a good start with my assets. Before starting the texturing, I added one fill layer, only with a roughness channel with the value of 1, which will be the top layer for every asset. Then, I took tons of layers for different colors just to play with.

To get the perfect Ghibli texture, I used default brushes in the Substance library; Artistic and Charcoal Brushes are going to be the perfect choice for the texture. After creating the base, put some sub-layers like Blur Slope, Blur, and Sharpen (filters), and add a generator (metal edge wear) in some fill layers. After completing the texture, I exported the maps from Substance in 4K resolution.

Lighting & Rendering

After completing the whole texturing process, I got back to Maya to export my whole scene, exporting each and every mesh in FBX format.

I choose Unreal Engine 5 to set up the rest, including lighting, rendering, and all the other activities. I prefer not to create a complicated material system for this project but just create a simple basic material.

Next, I added the Cine Camera Actor (16:9 DSLR), Focal Length 35.0, Aperture 2.8. After tweaking some values in the Directional Light and the Post-Process Volume, I perfectly captured the ambiance of Ghibli's light. Lastly, to give a final touch, I created a simple smoke material, inserting it into a plane; through this material, I showed the morning sun ray from the top left side. Movie Render Queue is used for the final rendering in UE5.

I mostly used these software: Maya, Substance 3D Painter, ZBrush, and Unreal Engine 5. Some of the post-processing of single renders is done in Photoshop. The render sequence is arranged in Premiere Pro to get the final video version.