Every scene in Nine Rivers starts as grey boxes in Blender. I block out the ground, the buildings and the camera angle first, because in a diorama the camera is the composition. Once the camera is right, it never moves more than a few degrees.
Five passes
Then come five passes. Pixel textures for every surface, painted at a fixed density so nothing looks sharper than anything else. An ink-wash sky painted by hand and stretched behind the scene. Light: one warm key light, one cool fill, and a lot of fog. Depth of field, so the foreground and the far mountains soften like a tilt-shift photograph. And finally the sprites, which stay perfectly flat.
Why the sprites stay flat
I tried shading the characters to match the 3D light. It looked like plastic. A flat sprite in a lit world reads as a person in a painting, which is exactly the feeling I want — the jianghu as a story someone is telling you.
The snowy temple of White Sands took three weeks of evenings. The bell alone was four.
