In September 2025, my partner and I watched through all of CITY: The Animation.
I adored the anime adaptation of Keiichi Arawi's previous series Nichijou for its comedic timing and strong writing, and CITY proved to be just as strong of a showing. Notably though, the show's ending sequence was styled like a large plasticine diorama, planting the seed of inspiration.
Around this time, I stumbled across a material asset library for Blender: Clay Doh.
I quickly nabbed the pack and set out to play with my new toys, inspired to create something in a similar vein.
Ending sequence from "CITY: The Animation" by Kyoto Animation
If you've followed my work over the years, it should come as no surprise that the scope of this project grew considerably. I originally planned on building an isolated diorama. Lollie would be mid-run atop a cube-shaped cutaway of a town street, with a lot of technology layered within the earth beneath. Initial sketches felt very bottom-heavy though, and I knew I wouldn't be satisfied with the outcome.
Then a new thought struck: What if it looked like the kind of plasticine dioramas you'd see in full-page gaming magazine adverts back in the day?
From there, the environment grew considerably. The top needed to feel simple but lively, while the underground needed to feel like a sort of ordered chaos. The topside would be majority plasticine, but the underground would introduce plastic elements. Nature was lumpy and misshapen, technology was perfectly-formed and sterile.
I later had the thought to include paper elements - first as "stickers" for more detailed elements, then as a stand-in for leaves and natural debris. Some world-building snuck its way in through the vending machine and the community notice board.
I could think of a dozen more "little details" to sneak into the scene, I was having a lot of fun with it all, but I'd eventually manage to spend two months on this entire scene before calling it done. There's a lot I'd love to say about Lollie's little world, but any other ideas would simply have to wait until next time, whenever that is.
The final render is 10,000 × 12,500PX with excess, cropped down to 8,184 × 11574PX. Printing at a resolution of 300DPI, it would measure up to just shy of 70 × 100CM (equivalent to a B1 poster), or 27.25 × 38.5IN. In order to render at this frankly-stupid resolution, I set up an array of 25 cameras so that I could render the image in 2,000 × 2,500PX tiles, and then reassemble them all into one single image.
I also learned that Blender's Glare compositing node is not resolution-agnostic. If you want a lens flare to look a certain way at a certain resolution, you have to very finely tune its settings — maybe even throw in a Blur node before it, so that you can smooth out the highlights and get your glares to behave the way they looked when you were working at a far smaller resolution.
Anyway, I'd love to get this printed someday.
