A brief 3D study of some of the traditional 2D environment pieces in Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo. The goal of this study was to adapt a loose, stylized, expressive pencil-on-paper style into 3D. All modeling was done in Maya, and all textures were digitally hand-painted in Krita. Scene assembly and post-processing was done in Unreal Engine 5.
Lit with post-processing and rendered in UE5.
Unlit and lighting only. A single, dim directional light was used in order to make it easier to extract high-contrast shadows in post-processing.
The original still from Ponyo that served as a reference for this study.
Foliage was broken into two sets: wider leaves and flowers, and grasses and blossoms. These cards are designed for a fixed camera angle in 2.5D, and include a handful of bold color pencil accents and hatch marks that can be observed in the original reference.
Each element can be moved around separately. Accents can be placed by hand, and the layering can also achieve some 3D parallax.
Lit and unlit cards.
Lit and unlit assets, foliage texture sheets, and post-processing material ball.