The Twice Lucky Restaurant - Jade City
This project was a big undertaking for me - first started it as a way to experiment with getting a stylized output from Blender using a combination of realistic materials and hand-painted textures, including hand-painted normal maps. Learned a lot about what to do and also spent hours going down dead ends but really happy with the result in the end!
Based on the Twice Lucky restaurant from Fonda Lee's Jade City book, a fantastic story set in an alternate 40's-50's Hong-Kong inspired city. Tried my best to capture that slightly fantasy, slightly vintage style that the books capture so well.
Final painting is about 90% render from Blender with an extra 10% of touch ups. Figures were entirely painted.
Early development sketches, ended up taking a less traditional direction in the end
Working out the floor plan
Raw render from Blender (Cycles)
Early test render to figure out the kinks with hand-painted diffuse and normal textures