Paint The World

Nintendo's Splatoon series has always been one of creativity, community, and inspiration. Encouraging players to find all the colours life has to offer and live loudly while doing so. I've been playing since the first entry on the Wii U, all the way to the present day with Splatoon 3. I've grown up with Splatoon and have many good memories of nights spent with friends fighting for our side during Splatfests.

Now that Splatoon 3 has come to a close with the end of its Grand Fest, I wanted to make something to celebrate the game and all the hard work that was put into it.

Past, present, or future; may they all forever be hopeful.

A Japanese version I made, with accompanying text that reads: "Your colours will never fade, paint the world".

Workflow Breakdown

This art piece was made in Blender. I've used Blender before to make all of the 3D assets seen in my game COSMIC PENGUIN PURSUIT, however, this was my first time using Blender for solely art and rendering purposes. Below is a very light breakdown of my workflow to create this piece.

The first thing I did was download the model of the player character from Splatoon 3, I chose the Octoling. Since the rig is already attached to the model, I did not need to re-rig and weight paint anything, however, I did adjust the bones a little bit to make it easier to pose for this piece. Once that was done I posed the armature until I was happy, hoping to give it a "floating" appearance.

Next, I started working with Metaballs to create the ink. These Metaballs pool and stick together naturally, so all I had to do was drag them around to get the effect I wanted. Since I wanted a "floating" style as previously mentioned, I tried to make this ink look more like the molten wax found in a Lava Lamp, rather than trying to be incredibly game-accurate.

After that, I added the text as a plane in front of the models and found the angle I liked most for this piece. I had to create a shader to remove the black background on the text.

The last thing I had to do was texture everything. To create the colours of the ink, I first converted the Metaballs to meshes and created shaders for them. The shader was a gradient shader that blends between team past, present, and future's in-game ink colours. For the Octoling, I just replaced all their textures with a white image to create a silhouette and a glowing effect. Once I was happy I added some simple post-processing effects and rendered the image from my desired angle before taking it to a photo editing software to clean up any imperfections.

For my first attempt, I don't think it's terrible, definitely not amazing but at least I got some very good practice with rendering and using pre-made industry-level assets. Thank you for reading.