Welcome to Peanatopia 🥜
This personal project emerged from the fact that, for a time, I quite literally lived on peanuts. Although I follow a more balanced diet now, they still play a crucial role in my life. Not only as a snack, but as a source of inspiration. Bit by bit, the idea for Peanatopia grew: a surreal and peaceful world fueled by peanut energy. My artistic exploration of this project takes shape not only through visual art, but also in the form of a 3D-animated short film, whose creation process is documented here.
PEANUt LIMOUSINE
The first asset is a limousine whose bodywork resembles a peanut shell. The idea existed long before it evolved into a larger project. At the time, I created two sketches of a pink car powered by peanut oil.
Later on, I modelled a more polished version in Blender. For the textures, I used a mix of graphic shaders and a custom peanut-shell material for the car panels, which I created using Substance Designer.
DESERT
The limousine is set to drive through a desert dominated by peanut-shaped rocks. There it also stops at a fuelling station to refill its oil tank. The station has a long, thin shape that looks like the stem of a plant growing out of the ground with an oil bubble crown at the top.
MRS. P.
This is the character driving the peanut limousine. She looks almost human, except for her skin, which has the structure of a peanut shell. Her overall appearance is elegant and a little bit stiff. She carries a woven basket bag and an umbrella to shield herself from the desert sun.
PEANUT CREATUREs & KITCHEN
The first scene of the short film takes place in a cozy kitchen in our world. There, a few little peanut creatures appear to deliver a jar of peanut butter from Peanatopia to the humans. They are roughly the size of a regular peanut and look like peanuts that have come to life.
PEAt Test Animation
To see one of the peanut creatures come to life I created Peat using Blender and Substance Painter. With the static mesh ready I added a rig and animated this little waving sequence.
PEANUt FIELDS
The first thing we see in Peanatopia are the spiral shaped peanut fields. In order to always have fresh peanuts available they grow staggered in time. For the plants I created a geometry nodes setup and experimented with different settings on the basis of an animation.
To get a first impression of the scene in 3d I modelled the landscape including the agricultural airplane in Blender and added a few basic shaders.
