3D Modeling

Recreation of a scene from“The Secret World of Arrietty.”

For this Intro to 3D Animation project draft, I chose to recreate a peaceful scene from the 2012 Studio Ghibli film The Secret World of Arrietty. I transformed the original 2D clip into a 3D style, modeling the individual components of the scene in order to rebuild it. My first semester-long 3D project, it covered techniques in rigging, sculpting, texturing, lighting, and animating, all of which provided me experience with Maya. The requirments were to be a clip of at least 30 seconds, a main figure, 3 props, camera movement, and some sort of movement in the main figure.

Autodesk Maya, Procreate. Fall 2025

Ideation

Before the mood-boarding and clean sketches, I had an ideation phase which involved rougher sketches of all the elements I eventually modeled. This included planning out my main view and the camera position/lighting, as well as sketches based off other clips throughout the movie.

Development Process

I then created a mood board for this project. With the original media being 2D, I needed to be clear with what I wanted my 3D end product to look like. I compiled movies and assets created by other artists that inspired me in terms of style, lighting, and color pallettes. After that I created clean drawings to be my modeling references.

Using my drawings of each element from multiple angles, I began modeling in Autodesk Maya. My process involved a simple cube scaled and extruded into the shape of each item. I made sure to change my point of view every few minutes, making sure that it looked accurate from every view. In the future, these models will be textured and the scene will include lighting.