Environment design
TAO YUZE 0366967
Bachelor fo Design (Honours) in Creative Media
Project 1
I will be combining this course with my Masters portfolio where I will be creating an environment design for my animation concept design project.In the animation, the protagonist needs to climb a symbolic building, representing ascent and circulation.
Since the animation itself is not relevant to this course, I will not explain the animation script in full, but only mention the parts related to the environment design.
At the beginning of the creation, I had decided that I wanted to make something like a tower, a structure with a symbol of upward and climbing. My earliest idea was to make a brutalist building made of simple geometry and concrete, but I really made too many similar things and I didn't want to be limited to this. So I planned to make something with a completely different style from the past, and the animation Berserk and Vampire Hunter gave me new inspiration.When it comes to climbing upward, I naturally think of the Tower of Babel, which has a distinctive spiral structure, but how to create a new and unique Tower of Babel became my research direction. I looked up some references, and many Tower of Babel designs are complex and stacked, giving people the feeling of an ant nest. I studied the steps to build such a structure in depth. The Tower of Babel is not a perfect spiral, but a chaotic spiral stack that gradually shrinks from bottom to top. I abstracted the Tower of Babel into a pile of architectural "circles" stacked together. Obviously, it is not feasible to model bit by bit, which is too tiring and inefficient. So I plan to use geometric nodes for modeling, so that I only need to build individual building modules.
Similar to the workflow for prop and vehicle design, I used a hybrid kitbash workflow. I first looked for some images of Gothic architecture that could be used for scanning. However, these images were full of clutter and required careful processing and cropping before they could be scanned.
After a lot of sifting, I picked out some of the available kitbash
Since the lighting of the image was very different, I couldn't guarantee that Delight would make the texture color similar, so I decided to delete the original image material and use a stylized shader I made myself. But I kept the separated color image material as displacement and normal to increase the details of the model surface.
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| Original |
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| Stylized |
After getting the kitbahes I could move on to the next step. I created a geometry node, which essentially instantiates the points on a curve in the shape of a circle into a mesh I specified. I copied the circle in different sizes and instances, and then combined them.
With the geometry nodes as the driver, I can explore the best combination modularly and efficiently.
In the early versions, I used a single hollow spiral structure, and the base of the tower had less decoration.
I soon realized that this design needed to be improved. I thought the design should be richer and more "spiky", just like in many movies and games. Although I am not a person who likes to pile up elements, I think it is the right way to do some Baroque-level decoration in this work. Use simple modules to create some complex structures that people can't tell at first glance. I have done too many works related to brutalism before, and now I want to challenge my ability in complex structures.
So, there was a second version of the design, which was very close to the final design. Based on the first version, I added a reverse spiral to enhance the visual richness of the spiral part. And I added a circle of spires at the bottom to break the circular shape.
In the final design, I adjusted the parameters of the geometry nodes, reduced the number of instantiations by changing the scale of the modules, thus improving performance, and expanded the perimeter of the tower. Finally, I added a series of stylized clouds to make it look more like a design from anime.
After the shape design is completed, I will shift my focus to the color and shader design, which is also a very important part, especially for an animation concept design.
In the initial version, I decided to make the tower's base color a warm and bright beige/khaki color, and the shadows a relatively bright dark green.
But after watching Vampire Hunter D, I had a new idea and tried a more gothic and darker color combination.
The color is made up of an unclear gray and scarlet shades, making the design more in line with the Gothic design style.
The cloud shader remains unchanged, resulting in color contrast
In the animation, there is an important scene showing a huge and uniquely designed clock mechanism inside the tower, so I immediately started to design it.
This section shows part of the tower's interior design (which will be shown in the animation). Since the animation itself is not relevant to this course, I will not explain the animation script in full, but only mention the parts related to the environment design.
Symbolism is important in this design. I want to express a dynamic balance, a contest-like trade-off, to embody the concreteness of the protagonist's life. In the setting of the animation, I use the hand as a symbol to represent the dynamic and impermanent occurrence. I also need a ritual display that is very gorgeous but has no clear purpose, just like the decoration of false windows and false arches on Gothic buildings.
In this part I still used most of the assets from the tower
I designed the structure to be inside the spiral of the tower, with a giant wraparound design as the theme (inspired by the armillary sphere)
In this structure, the hour, minute, and second dials on the dial are separated into the shape of a celestial sphere, and the pointers are replaced by three statues, which point to the hour, minute, and second. The dials rotate to change the time. This design makes it cumbersome to observe the time, but this is exactly the expression of the "meaningless ritual" I want, which is the embodiment of the protagonist's life and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
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