MAALAT, Gorgeous Painterly 3D Still Life of Filipino Salty Foods

MAALAT is a painterly 3D still-life personal project by Filipino artist Kem, featuring salted duck eggs, sawsawan, and tuyo. It combines Blender modeling and Cycles rendering with Photoshop post-produ

Filipino 3D artist Kem’s personal project MAALAT is a 3D still life that places salted duck eggs, sawsawan, and tuyo in a single composition. While the work draws on the cultural context of the food, its goal is not a sleek, photorealistic CG look but surfaces resembling a still life painting with visible brushwork.

A Still Life Made in Blender, with Color Refined in Photoshop

The modeling and sculpting were done in Blender, and the render used Cycles. Adobe Photoshop was then used for color correction and post-production to strengthen the dusty, painterly tone. Color correction, glare, and vignette effects were also used in Blender, so the render and post-production stages serve different levels of finishing rather than simply repeating the same role.

A Different Production Method for Each Material

All the materials were created from scratch. Kem processed personally photographed textures in Photoshop and blended them with node shaders, using a different approach for each object. For the eggshells and tomatoes, Kem used noise- and Voronoi-based nodes, while a stencil made from a directly photographed real texture was used for the dried fish.

Traces Left Behind Instead of ‘Perfect CG’

The calamansi and the insides of the salted eggs were finished by combining painted textures with photographic textures. Rather than standardizing every surface with a single procedure, the key to this still life was choosing nodes, photographic textures, or painting according to the roughness and color variations observed in each food. As a result, the work involves not only achieving material accuracy but also controlling the overall image so it does not appear overly digital.

Source: 80 Level