The lady from the rising sun - 1st place Blender Discord Challenge

Hi everyone! This is my latest project, and it happens to be the winner of the Blender Discord's January Challenge themed "Japan".

Once I heard that the theme was "Japan" I started thinking about what I wanted to create, and looking for references, I came across this gorgeous art style from old artists in Japan that seems to blend water paint with ink, making these beautiful paintings, so then I though about trying to recreate that art style with all my knowledge from 3D art. As I didn't want to just splash ink and smudged textures or hand-drawn objects, I wanted the environment to be full 3D whilst giving that "painted" vibe to it. I created some shaders that combined information from Fresnel, geometry, and normals, combining them with several textures to hide the silhouettes and applying this painted gradient whenever there was a change in lighting or face angle.

Added to this, I also wanted to not recreate it with realistic reflections and lighting, so I played with the values of visibility from certain objects to remove or add reflections, even creating planes that cut the reflections to give the water this burned white colour in the areas that I wanted it, on top of this, for the terrain, with my shaders it still showed the outer crevices due to my use of displacement, so I added another layer of vertex painting to black out certain areas so that only the outer edges would have highlights.

Since my shaders simplified the shapes a lot, I didn't have to make the 3d models with lots of detail, so distant objects are simple 3d modelled versions, as that simplicity helps to guide the eye, only using the silhouettes. I also used a couple of particle systems, mainly for the leaves.

For the assets, I used one of the trees, a shrub, and some rocks from Botaniq. The dog model was found in Sketchfab, the rest is hand modelled, tweaked, rigged, posed, and textured by me. All elements in the scene are 3D.

Also, I put the scene in my Store page here in artstation so that you may take a look at it if you want:
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/qpBwP/japanese-ink-style-blender-scene?utm_source=artstation&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=homepage&utm_term=marketplace