A 3D animation built around a spring nerikiri menu. Nerikiri is a form of Japanese wagashi — shaped by hand, designed to hold a season in a single composition. The forms here start as something glassy and precise, close to the original confections. Small green flowers fall and land on the pieces and the plate. Then the plate lifts, the confections expand into open air, and collide. The delicacy of the source material stays. The stillness doesn't.
Nerikiri
3D ANIMATION
CREATIVE DIRECTION
2026
Nerikiri
3D ANIMATION
CREATIVE DIRECTION
2026
A 3D animation built around a spring nerikiri menu. The artist works with two opposing textures — forms that are glassy and precise, with sharp edges and a cool translucency, and forms that are soft and billowing, warm like cream and opening like flowers. Both qualities exist in the same scene, and the contrast between them is the point. Flowers appear throughout the artist's work, woven into the food itself. They appear here too.
Making nerikiri is closer to sculpture than cooking. The artist builds with geometry, precise cuts, controlled edges, forms that hold their shape through structural logic as much as ingredient. The glassy pieces in particular carry a specific quality of cool: hard-edged, translucent, each surface meeting the next at an exact angle. Working in Cinema 4D felt like the same process from a different direction: starting with a mesh instead of a mold, but asking the same questions about how a surface holds, where light enters, what makes a form feel finished. The shader that finally worked was one that held light from the inside rather than reflecting it off the surface, the same quality the confections have when you hold them up to a window. The translation between the two disciplines wasn't a stretch. It was almost obvious.
Flowers are a constant in the artist's work. They appear pressed into surfaces, layered into forms, treated with the same structural attention as everything else. They are also the clearest signal of the season. For the animation, a particle system emits small flowers that fall and settle across the confections and the plate, covering everything gradually until the scene is dense with them. It is the transition between states, between the cool precision of the first forms and the warmth of what follows. Spring arriving not as a moment but as an accumulation.