How to Make Delicious 2D-Like Ramen in Blender

Introduction

Hi everyone! My name is Elena Shutkina. I’m originally from Russia, but I now live in South Korea with my husband. To be honest, I can’t say that I’m a 3D artist because I work as a 2D environment artist. But from the beginning of my journey to game development, 3D was an important part of my work, the same as drawing. I started with 3ds Max and then tried Maya, but in the end, I met Blender and fell in love with it from the first cube. A few months after I started with Blender, I received my first big offer. It was a mobile game, but I had to have 3D skills to make 2D art for it. So since then, I have used 3D in commercial and personal projects.

At first, I used Blender only as a helper when I needed to make the correct object for future paintover. However, I started to learn more about the possibilities of this wonderful program. And they are huge! Geometry Nodes, Grease Pencil, and the Toon shader are really strong instruments for making a 2D picture in 3D space. Amazing, isn’t it? So when I realized it, I started to practice in Blender more and more.

It's Time to Make a Ramen!

It's time to make ramen! started as a joke. During a little trip with my husband, we ate some ramen in a no-name restaurant. It was my first time eating it and I took a picture first. Unfortunately, the ramen didn't taste good at all, but it gave me the idea of cooking my ramen. So here is my only reference. 

I’m really not good at cooking but I promised my husband to make better ramen. And I kept my word.

Modeling

I am a big fan of Studio Ghibli's animations, and I knew that I could render in this style in Blender. I never did those, so it was time.

I modeled the objects in a really simple way. The table is just a plane, the egg is half of the sphere with some transformations, and the onions are cylinders. Maybe the most interesting part is the bowl itself and the noodles.

I use a slightly unusual way to make bowls, pots, columns, and other cylinder-like objects. I always start from a point. You can find this instrument if you switch on the Add Mesh: Extra Objects add-on.

Then I make a silhouette of the object and apply the stack of such modifiers as Screw, Solidify, and Subdivision. It helps to define perfect simply editable shapes in a few seconds.

As for the noodles, I only knew how to make them from a curve, but it takes a lot of time. So I decided to search for another way and I found it thanks to a tutorial by Fattu Tutorials. Following it, I made a long cylinder with some divides, added a Cloth modifier, and made some adjustments to its properties. But one big noodle wasn’t enough to fill my bowl, so I copied it 3 times and then baked a falling animation. 

Texturing

Texturing in 2D style is easier than you may think. I used one famous way to do cartoonish shaders and just adjusted the colors for each part of the ramen.

For the outline, I used the Solidify modifier with flipped normals and added a second material, which I called Outline, to each object. I changed the color of this material to black and switched on the Backface Culling option.

The most important part of ramen is the liquid itself. At that point, I needed to find an interesting way to make it. And again, I spent some time googling.

I found a curious tutorial with a similar theme by CGMoe. I took the texture for the table from his tutorial as well but adjusted the color according to my color palette.

The liquid was great but needed some important adjustments. I wanted it to react to the ingredients when they mixed.

First of all, I made a Geometry Nodes setup that made the liquid "aware" of the ingredients.

Second, I added some nodes to the material to make the liquid show waves when objects touch it. The result was not ideal but enough for my purposes.

Because of the NGone in the base, the liquid material didn’t work well. I fixed it by adding the correct structure to the mesh.

Animation

After modeling and texturing, I started to animate other parts of the ramen. I inserted the first key by location on the timeline, moved 20 keys forward, repositioned the objects outside the camera frame, and inserted the key by location again. And after that, it took a lot of patience to organize the timing of each object in the right way. In the end, I had something like this:

To make movement more interesting and natural when the object fall into the water, I moved to Graph Editor and changed keyframe interpolation to Elastic. Also, I added a Noise modifier to make movement random and the feeling of boiling water.

The steam is also an interesting detail. At its base, it is a twisted plane with a transparent material. I started making the material from a Noise texture node, experimented a bit, and made mistakes until I received the right shape of steam.

Rendering

For rendering, I used Eevee. To make the scene look better, it is important to switch on parameters such as Bloom and Screen Space Reflection, as well as adjust parameters in Color Management.

Once the rendering process was completed, I moved on to post-production to fine-tune the final video. For that, I went to a user-friendly video editor called CapCut. I used it to add some more VFX effects, text, transitions, and music to the project. 

When I started the project, I wanted to make a fun short video clip for YouTube, but then I changed the frame size to upload it to my portfolio on ArtStation too. 

Conclusion

The whole project, from start to finish, took only 2 full-time days. I had a lot of fun making it! I was so inspired that I took only some short breaks for food and one long break for sleeping.

My advice to beginner artists is to focus on having fun with the process. Enjoy what you do, try new methods, make mistakes, and search for a better way of doing anything. Never stop, even if it is hard. And do not forget to add little details that make your work much better and yummy. 

I’m very grateful to 80 Level for the opportunity to share this project. Also, I want to express my gratitude to Aleksandr Iwaac for showing me the new world of possibilities in Blender last year and inspiring me to dive into it with new forces.

That’s it. I hope you found something useful! 

Elena Shutkina, Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine