Major Project1

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Bachelor fo Design (Honours) in Creative Media

During the preparation for my Major Project, I decided to make it my final work at Taylor's (not the last, but the best). I wanted to combine the most representative workflows of entertainment design with some interdisciplinary elements. I didn't want to simply do character or environment design; I wanted to try something unique. Previously, when I designed a character or environment, it was usually for an entertainment product like a game. But I believe entertainment design skills can do much more than that. While learning about architectural design processes, I found that architectural design is very similar to conceptual design in many ways, but architectural design uses reality as its stage. I felt that combining conceptual design and architectural design—designing a project set in reality, but not being overly constrained by physics and mathematics—is essentially still about expressing a "concept."

I call this project "Treehouse," and it's inspired by unfinished buildings in Kuala Lumpur. The word "treehouse" literally means a house built in a tree. In the construction of this building, the "tree" acts as a permanent framework, while the house is a modular structure built according to the tree's structure.

When I saw some abandoned buildings overgrown with vegetation, I thought, "Isn't this a kind of reverse 'treehouse'?" That's how I came up with the idea of ​​a "treehouse." Essentially, my treehouse is still a frame-and-module structure, but I've replaced the "tree" part with a concrete frame (the abandoned building), from which I build the modular "house" part. In this concept, the same frame system can have its function changed by modifying the modules, thus achieving cost savings.

Regarding the productization aspect, I define my project as a digital "scaled model," a tool typically used by developers to showcase unfinished architectural products. I envision a use case for selling "treehouses," achieving a higher level of presentation through immersive digital "scaled models."

In summary, the treehouse project comprises two parts: the treehouse concept itself and the product's usage scenarios.

I started by modeling the framework, which is my "tree" part. I had a ready-made reference outside my window: an unfinished apartment building.

The building framework itself doesn't have a particularly complex modeling structure, but achieving a highly realistic appearance requires an excellent material system. Firstly, off-the-shelf PBR material spheres are not a good choice, as they often have repetitive tiles, resulting in a poor visual effect. The best option is to use phototextures to create a procedural texture from scratch for my project.

I designed this entirely new procedural material. I scrambled the brick texture using noise calculations and then input the brick texture as UV coordinates into the texture map. This allows for a seamlessly scrambled texture, thus eliminating the repetitive feel of tiles.

The base color was created by mixing multiple different concrete photographs, resulting in a rich and realistic appearance. I also used AO nodes as masks to create the edge color-changing effect.

Although all the material information comes from a single image, I converted it into a "fake PBR" texture using curves and color gradients to achieve realistic roughness and normals.

After I finished the framework, I wasn't really sure what the modular parts would look like. I only vaguely imagined it would be something like a container house, composed of multiple rectangular structures that could be freely stacked and linked together.

In the early stages of module development, I designed a set of geometric nodes to procedurally generate simple modules of any scale and size, which consisted of a copper-colored frame, glass, and wood.

I briefly explored the possible combinations of modules. The modules themselves shouldn't be limited by the framework design; essentially, the original design of the framework shouldn't affect the module combinations. Modules can be placed anywhere as needed.

I then designed the second version of the module, which was even more comprehensive.

In the final plan, I used a more stable and conservative approach.

The development of the treehouse also included some auxiliary products, such as the color scheme I used. The standard Blender AGX color scheme is too gray and not suitable for direct use. So I designed a separate color scheme based on the ACES color space for this project, emphasizing a clear and bright visual style.

Because my scene is quite large, containing a vast amount of vegetation and trees, using standard tree model assets is impractical; even my workstation can't handle such a massive polygon count. Therefore, I designed a planar billboard plant system. These are essentially images with alpha channels, but through special node control, they are always oriented towards the camera, resulting in a very realistic appearance from a distance.