MAALAT, Gorgeous Painterly 3D Still Life of Filipino Salty Foods

Filipino 3D artist Kem shared their 3D still life that looks like a real-life painting.

A talented artist known as Kem created a gorgeous still life inspired by traditional Filipino cuisine that features salted duck eggs, a local dipping sauce called sawsawan, and tuyo (salted, sun-dried small fish). The scene looks like a painting but is a 3D project made with Blender. The artist explains that their background in traditional painting helps them create 3D artworks that resemble real-life art pieces.

Kem did most of the work in Blender: they used it for 3D modeling and sculpting and then rendered the composition in Cycles. To enhance the painterly feel, they went to Adobe Photoshop for color grading and post-production. Everything was created from scratch, including the textures. Kem photographed their own textures, processed them using Adobe Photoshop, and blended them with node shaders and textures. The artist explained that they textured each of the objects differently.

"For the eggshells and tomatoes, I relied on the power of node shaders, lots of noise, and Voronoi. Other stuff, like the dried fish, was painted with stencils of actual textures that I personally photographed. I just enhanced those by mixing them with shader nodes. I mixed some of the textures with painted textures, and this is what I did with the small lime (calamansi) and the inside part of the salted egg," the artist wrote on Reddit.

While Photoshop played a huge part in creating the dusty painting look, Kem emphasized that Blender has plenty of tools for color management, too. They said they use Blender for color grading, glare, vignette, and color correction. The artist also noted that they learned a lot about creating an imperfect, non-CGI-looking composition in Blender thanks to Gleb Alexandrov's tutorials.

MAALAT is one of Kem's personal projects. If you want to see more of their painting-like 3D artworks, check out their Instagram and Reddit.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kem (@syutpati_kem)

If you want to try to create your own painterly 3D pieces, we have quite a few tutorials for you to check out. Rik De Keersmaeker told us how to make painterly PBR tiles, Frankie Povarchik explained how to build a Ghibli-style environment, and Karim Hassanein talked us through the process of creating colorful textures.

Rik De Keersmaeker

Frankie Povarchik

Karim Hassanein

Subscribe to our Newsletter, join our 80 Level Talent platform, Discord, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

Are you a fan of what we do here at 80 Level? Then make sure to set us as a Preferred Source on Google to see more of our content in your feed.