LoFi Girl
LoFi Girl, or “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to” is one of the more famous streams on YouTube in recent years. In July 2022 the stream was temporarily taken down, which sent waves through the internet. This was the inspiration behind the artwork, which aimed to see what can be done in 3D, to capture the coziness of the already legendary artwork.
RocketCoil reimagined the “Lo-Fi Girl”.
Challenge: Make the artwork have the warm atmosphere of the original
LoFi Girl was introduced in 2018, and the artwork probably became more famous than the channel itself (anyone remembers the channel being named “chilled cow”? No, of course not. We know it as ‘lo fi girl’). Besides of the iconic design of the girl studying and writing notes, the next most prominent feature was just the cozy atmosphere. Looking at it made you want to stay in your house, playing chill music in the background and … studying?
Original art (from before animation)
How was it achieved?
Making an illustration in 3D can have its challenges. The one that 3D artists try to avoid the most is called “uncanny valley”, which is the feeling of something falling right into the ‘almost alive’ gap. Well, it looks lifeless. There are ways to go about it, but here at RocketCoil, we’ve learned to pull the strings to achieve the desired results (not limited to 3D artwork, hehe).
The first part was to take the character design that feels welcoming. We’ve used the 3D model we already know from other projects and adapted it. Kaylee from Faery Tale was just the right fit since the get-go, we recolored her shirt, and added the scarf and sleeve ends.
3D artists are familiar with the pose on the left. The rest of us are more familiar with the pose on the right.
The next job was to place Kaylee and the environment. Our goal was to prioritize the “vibe” of the place and spend as little time as possible on textures. We have pushed this idea to the extreme when making the book spines, most of which have very little to do with their real-life counterparts.
A lot of the time was in fact spent on lighting, combined with the right atmospheric effect. A major effect of the original artwork is created by the faint halo that the desk lamp casts in front of her face. Recreating this effect in 3D was a real challenge, since the environment ‘fog’ had to be thick enough to bounce the light around, but not thick enough to obscure the scene.
In 3D, don’t build anything you don’t absolutely have to.
As with films, it’s always good to check the final result in compositing software and give it little tweaks that tell the story better. In our case, there were no additional paint-overs, just bringing the rendered channels in and amplifying the lighting for better balance. Due to the aforementioned fog effect, the final render was somewhat reserved on the contrast.
In this step, the decision came to give homage to the relaxed nature of the realism in the original artwork, so a little bit of playing with the channels was in order. The playfulness in lighting came in, and it allowed the artwork to get slightly stronger bends around the shadows, and more vibrancy as well.
The goal here is not to alter the artwork, but rather to amplify its strength.
In the grand scheme of things, the render is already where it should be. Let’s get it just a bit more … illustrative.