I woke up very early again today. Though the past few days (weeks?) I've been working on another Your Name scene,
today I decided to start on a Tenki no Ko scene. I used a couple of Turbosquid resources (aircons by Gorandodic and Vartanyan) for this one.
I've probably spent a hundred hours on the Your Name scene, this has just been today.
I didn't want to spend so long on it that I had to model every little detail, so it's not an 100% replica.
I plopped the actual frame from the movie into the back for the super far buildings. Maybe someday I'll model them.

Apparently the little cocoon shaped building is called 東京モード学院 (Tokyo-Mode Gakuen Tower).
According to Wikipedia it's 204 metres tall. It has a fashion vocational school, a tech/design college, and a Medical college. Apparently it's the second tallest educational building in the world, also.
I remember years ago looking at the facilities in this building with Fox. Pretty sure it's like a game-dev school. Kind of funny that I'm now attempting something that so many years ago I only dreamed about.

This first animated render is one of the first truly animated scenes I've done in Blender. The Your Name Hida Bus Stop scene may eventually feature a fully animated version, though.
I rendered a camera pull on it, but want to composite it before I post it.
This one is my first delve into volumetric effects - the steam is fully volumetric!
I had to do a little trick on it to get it seamless in Premiere, though.
Also, particle systems! The drips are all physics simulatious coming off the curves of the wires.
I think it's relaxing and quite pretty. I may try to give it more detail some day. A second pass is rendering right now with more interesting camera movement.
For reference, the whole image is based off of this scene from the movie:

Shinkai's scenes are so pretty. Especially the ones with rain.

7/12/2021

A lot of progress with the Kimi no Na Wa Bus Stop! I started a few days ago by modeling the preliminary bus stop and sign:

Surprisingly, the hardest part was the sign. UV unwrapping is really difficult, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.
The second and third render introduced (and fixed some specular bugs) with the postbox.
This is probably the most complicated part of the whole scene! I modeled it myself.
Again, unwrapping is really difficult. I still don't really have the hang of it. I just used smart-unwrap.
For something so geometric it's not really a problem, but I gotta get the hang of the process soon.

(Render 3 above) also included the sign for the bus stop. I had people on HelloTalk help me with the kanji because it was quite blurry.
The sign is one of my favourite parts!
Also, the big pillar got added around here. Not sure what it's supposed to attach to... wondering what I'll do about this in VRchat, haha.
The next render brought about the tarp covered in logs and the little dirt path. Messing with vertex groups was cool. Not 100% happy with the shader on the tarp - I messed with it more later.

Render 5 introduced some nicer, dusk-like lighting and the posters! I'm super happy with the posters! I will elaborate on them later...
Render 6 is nearly the same as 7, so I'll skip over it...
Render 7 includes the final pesrpective and lighting position finalised.

Some compositing and focus stuff was done later to make the final image look better. But before we get into that, let's look at a couple of the neat assets I used!

The logo for Hida City. Hida City is meccha country-side in Japan, in Gifu-ken. I would love to visit there someday.

The bus sign. I approximated this as best I could. Some nice person on HelloTalk helped me find exactly what was written.

This is the calendar from the bus stop in the movie. Like, the actual one! Which I'm pretty sure is the one that (was?) there in real life too.
平成28年 is 2017. That's the year of the release of the movie! Not sure when the movie was set exactly.
It's not perfect - I had to recreate the green box and the text and try to make it look nice.
It's suitable for a render, but I wouldn't print it out and put it on my wall or anything.

The second poster on the wall. A train schedule! Pretty cool.

The third poster on the wall. I'm not 100% sure what it is, so I put the text "bus time schedule" on the top in Japanese. I also had to repair this one.
Now, to the final composite render!

I added the characters sitting inside for fun. I think it looks nice, I'm happy with it!

And an alternate perspective. I think it somehow looks more photo-real from this side.
I hid a few easter eggs in there! Mitsuha's birthday is somewhere in the scene. As is her name! And my name and Fox's. I also hid my birthday somewhere in there. Can you spot it?
It's been a fun journey. I've probably spent 8.5 hours on this on two different days. Quite a while. But I think it turned out nicely for my second ever render!
Now to get it into VRChat...

6/30/2021

I completed my first render in Blender!
I started at 4:38am and it's now 15:47 so I've been at it for quite a while.
I was following the Blender Guru tutorial, of course. I've been meaning to actually learn to use blender for quite a while.
I'm already moving on to my next project, building a reference board for a VRChat map based on the bus stop in Your Name.
Of course, the first step is to model it. It's pretty simple and geometrical, so I can't imagine it'll be that complicated... but there's a lot of stuff that surrounds it.

6/22/2021