[Art] The Interiors of Oat Pi University #1!

Hey y’all,

This time, I’ve been working on Evelyn’s Office, aka the Dean’s Office, and the Classroom.

The original scenes were made back in 2017, using an old version of Autodesk Maya. I’d render each background into several different images, creating the lighting and outline images, which I’d combine together in Photoshop. I’d then hand this image to Buka, letting her do the paint over, giving it color and texture.

At the time, painting it by hand was a lot easier to do than creating a full 3D scene in Maya. We could paint it however we wanted, and add props like books, plants and other details, to the scene to fill it out using Clip Studio.

But with the new backgrounds, I'm doing a lot of the work in Blender, modelling details and adding props into the scene, instead of hand painting them. 

This lets Buka keep her focus on the characters and CG scenes, while I focus on creating the backgrounds and the writing.

In the original scenes, we’d often have to use light trickery to fake the lighting, blurring it and painting in extra ones, which was very time consuming. Depending on the scene it could take a few days to do, and it was hard to tell if it was going to look good at all.

But in Blender, it's not as difficult because of its “Cycles” rendering engine.

Cycles uses physically based materials to simulate how lights interact and bounce around the scene, kind of like in the real world. What’s even cooler is that I can preview it in almost real-time.

This really helps with making adjustments and experimentation to find something that looks nice without having to wait or hand paint adjustments.

I can also make much higher quality backgrounds that has lighting and details that look nice right from the start before even taking them into Clip Studio.

If I make a mistake, or I feel like it needs more detail, I can update the scene quickly, render out the changes and bring it into Clip Studio without having to redo everything. Which is super great!

Here’s the initial test renders for Evelyn’s Office and the Classroom, that I used to plan out the lighting.

How does it look? Have you tried rendering stuff in Blender yourself? Let me know what you think in the comments.

~ Zuri Sama ~