Basil Sake
Fully handpainted asset based on a friend's ceramic sake cup that was used to propagate basil cuttings in a way I found visually striking. Modeled/animated in Blender, textured in Substance 3D Painter and Photoshop, and composited in After Effects.
I experimented with Adobe Animate for the frames of the water texture, but found that rendering an animated armature through a subdivided texture plane created a smoother result that didn't distract from the rest of the scene.
Handpainted cherry wood texture and alpha map
The text includes conventions that apparently haven't been in use for centuries, as well as other choices that indicate a non-Japanese origin. I still recreated the kanji as I saw it, capturing the handwriting as well as scratches and rubbed-off ink.
Wireframe turntable
Leaf motion from simple armatures
