Unseen Garden is a personal 3D animation series which is about flowers and insects, they are currently on sale on Superrare. While we’re not watching, bees are waking up for work from their honey dreams, snails are fascinated by water drops shining like jewellery, and fireflies use flowers to charge their lights. Making a world unseen from our eyes is one of my passions for creation.
Artist : Marina Nakagawa
Sound design: Giorgio Riolo (SAVETHESOUND)
Artist : Marina Nakagawa
Sound design: Giorgio Riolo (SAVETHESOUND)
The Sunny Garden is the first work I created for this series. I came up with this idea from looking at a catalogue from the rose breeding specialist, David Austin. It’s about a rose and a happy sleepy bee on a Monday morning.
Night Garden is about a snowdrop and fireflies. I grew up in the countryside in Japan and during the summer season, I could see lots of fireflies in the rice fields. I came up with the idea of fireflies charging their lights from flowers which look like lampshades.
I came up with this idea in June, which is the rainy season in Japan. During this season, you can see the colourful hydrangeas and lots of snails too. I also wanted to create something with a different type of animal from the other two artworks, so this idea worked perfectly.
At the beginning of the production of Unseen Garden, I had a very rough idea of what I wanted to do, one insect and one flower per artwork; perfectly looping animation; and very ambient sound effects. Based on that plan, I made ideas for 3 animations. Bee and rose, firefly and snowdrop, and snail and hydrangea.
Modelling the rose for Sunny Garden
I modelled the rose petal from a simple plane and used the cloner tool to make the flower shape. I made each petal editable and exported the .fbx file into Zbrush. I added organic details to each petal to make the flower look more organic and realistic. Here are models made with C4D (left) and the model with details (right)
Bee’s model and Rig
This chubby bee model is very simple. I made the model from a cube and subdivided it to make a nice rounded shape, I modelled arms, legs and eyes separately.
This bee’s animation was also very simple, so I rigged their legs with bones and used the bend deformer and Squash & Stretch tool to control the whole body. I also used pose morph to create the mouth animation.
Making materials
Once I finished modelling, I made UV maps and created materials with Substance painter.
Substance painter is a great tool for creating both realistic and stylized textures. The greatest thing about this software is the UI and processes are very similar to Photoshop and it’s very easy to paint the materials.
I wanted to make a stylised, warm, hand painted look. So I added layers of several colours with noise masks to create a painted feel and added some more layers. I painted using brushes on top of it.
Let's get buzzy!
It’s important to plan out the timing of animation before adding keyframes, especially when creating a loop animation. For the main bee in the centre, I carefully positioned it so it is completely hidden inside the flower in the first frame and he appears naturally after that.
It’s important to plan out the timing of animation before adding keyframes, especially when creating a loop animation. For the main bee in the centre, I carefully positioned it so it is completely hidden inside the flower in the first frame and he appears naturally after that.
I added some bees around the flower and added a subtle animation on the leafs too. These small animated elements add naturalness and vibrancy to the whole animation.
Lighting
For the whole scene lighting, I used HDRI from Polyheaven (https://polyhaven.com/hdris) and added a quite subtle key light, top light, and backlight.
Then, I added a light to mimic sunlight coming through leaves and trees, to add some interesting shadows. To do that, I made an area light from the top-right. Then go to object setting, set the “spread” amount to a very small number, around 0.005. This makes a sharp light coming from the light source like a spotlight. Then I add a big plane between the light and the object. For the material for the plane, I added an RS noise and plugged it into the Opacity Colour. This noise works as the alpha mask and makes the noise shape holes on the plane. The light can go through and make a cool, organic shadow.
I was very happy with the render result, so I didn’t need to change much in AfterEffect.
Here is the render from C4D (left) and the image I colour corrected and added the subtle lens flare (right).
Making snowdrops for Night Garden
Because snowdrops are a much simpler shape compared to roses, I just modelled it in C4D, then made textures with Substance Painter.
Firefly’s model and Rig
For the firefly I re-used the bee model and just altered some body parts. I added new wings and a big lightbulb on their backside. For rigging, because I was planning to create a more complicated animation compared to the bees, I needed to rig them using bones instead of using deformers.
Let's animate!
The animation process was a bit harder than Sunny Garden because of the complexity. I animated the main two fireflies first, then added the light bulb animation using the constrain tag attached to the flower, then to the firefly’s hands, and finally to the other fireflies’ backside.
Here is the early stage of the animatic without the light bulb (left) and the final animatic (right).
Spark spark..
Lighting was a bit tricky for this animation because it’s a night scene, but there are lots of light sources from the light bulbs and the flowers. To maintain consistency throughout the series, I used the same HDRI and similar lighting setup as “Sunny Garden” for the environment, and adjusted the brightness and colour. Then I added the emitting material and area light to each light bulb and shining flower.
HDRI and area lights (left), with light through the plane with noise material (middle) / with light from flowers and fireflies (right)
Final Render using Garagefarm
In this animation there are a lot of area lights and emitting materials, and also some glass materials. This made the rendering take so long. Each frame took about 40 minutes on my machine, so it was great that I could use Garagefarm for rendering. Set to ‘low priority’ it took just about an hour to render all 265 frames and only cost about $30 USD. I think it’s very reasonable considering how long it would have taken to render the whole animation with my machine.
I rendered a beauty pass (left) and an emission pass (middle), then in the After Effect, I added the glow effect to the emission pass, put it on top of the beauty pass and changed the blend mode to add. I then adjusted the exposure and added the subtle lens flare (right).
Modelling the hydrangea
First, I made two sets of flowers with slightly different shapes. I used the Cloner tool and positioned about 150 flowers to gather around a rounded shape. I adjusted the position of flowers using Random and Push apart.
It already looked okay but some flowers were intersecting a lot, so I added the Rigid body tag to the cloner and from the force setting, I set the following position and rotation parameter to 12. I also set the Mass setting to custom Mass and changed the parameter to 0 so these flowers won’t look droopy. Now once I play the animation, the flowers spread and intersect with each other less. Once I was happy with the position of the flowers, I set the initial state and removed the Rigid body tag, so the flowers won’t move anymore.
It already looked okay but some flowers were intersecting a lot, so I added the Rigid body tag to the cloner and from the force setting, I set the following position and rotation parameter to 12. I also set the Mass setting to custom Mass and changed the parameter to 0 so these flowers won’t look droopy. Now once I play the animation, the flowers spread and intersect with each other less. Once I was happy with the position of the flowers, I set the initial state and removed the Rigid body tag, so the flowers won’t move anymore.
Modelling and rigging the snail
I modelled the snail with Blender. The reason I used Blender was that I wanted to sculpt this snail rather than box model it, and Blender has a great Dynamic Remeshing tool which works like the dynamic tool in Zbrush and yes, it’s free! After sculpting the snail model, I used an awesome plugin called Quad Remesher and retopologized the model. Quad Remesher is a paid plugin but it’s by far the better retopologizing tool compared to the free ones. I still like to retopologize my models manually, especially when I create a humanoid model, but it’s a very handy tool to use and I can save a lot of time using this plugin. I definitely recommend it. Sculpting is a very intuitive way of modelling and you can experiment with your ideas more during the modelling process compared to box modelling.
After that, I imported the snail model into C4D. I’d love to learn how to rig and animate with Blender in the future, but for now, I keep using C4D for rigging and animating.
This is the rigged version of the snail.
Animation
I animated the flower and raindrops first then animated the snails reacting to them.
Here is the first animatic of the raindrop falling onto the leaf, sliding off the leaf and dropping.
Here is the first animatic of the raindrop falling onto the leaf, sliding off the leaf and dropping.
The water drop animation is made from a simple sphere to which I added the Squash & Stretch and FFD deformer. Then I set the pose morph tag to ‘FFD Deformer’ to morph this sphere from a droplet shape to a flattened water drop.
Final Render using Garagefarm
Because there are lots of transparent raindrops in this scene, rendering took a long time on my local machine, so it was another perfect chance for me to use Garagefarm. It took about 30 minutes to render all 264 frames. I just rendered the beauty pass for this project (left), colour corrected and added lens flare (right)
And that’s it! I hope you found this article interesting and useful. I really enjoyed making these works and I’m planning to make more for this series in the future. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via social media.
