Artist Builds Delicious 3D Ramen Bowl In Gaming’s Unity Engine

Harry Alisavakis is a technical and VFX artist working in the video game business. He is also the creator of one of the most delicious-looking pieces of 3D art I have ever seen.

As part of #TechnicallyAChallenge, a technical artist community challenge that grew out of a discord that was actually started by Alisavakis, he decided to take a shot at the latest theme, which was “food”.

In just one night, totalling around 5-6 hours work, Alisavakis was able to build this scene in Unity, crafting all the models from scratch. He tells me most of his time was spent “tweaking and moving lights around”, and that while most of the shaders used were already on-hand, the one he made just for this project—a “bespoke soup shader”—has been blowing up on Twitter over the weekend, and with good reason:

The steam, the glistening broth, the glint on the eggs, gah, I’m getting hungry just looking at this. If you’re wondering how the whole thing looks so “anime”, Alisavakis says “it was a combination of figuring out how food looks in anime and how to stop things from looking 3D”.

“I used a shallow field of view to make the scene look almost orthographic, cause perspective distortion can betray that a scene is 3D, and I didn’t use any of unity’s default shaders as they are too soft on the shading and lighting”, he says. “A cheat I also do with these effects is lowering the frame rate of some animations to make them look as if they’re hand drawn.”

If you’re more technically-minded, Alisavakis has written a thread where he gets into the finer details of how he put the piece together. Here, for example, is a gif showing all the individual components he had to model:

If you want to see more of Alisavakis’ work, you can check it out at his personal site, ArtStation page and Twitter account.