Temple Ruins

Experience Type: Environment Design & Production for VR

Role: 3D Designer & Production Artist

Platform: PC-VR

Game Engine: Unity 2019.3.11f1

Additional Tools: Blender 2.8, Adobe Photoshop

The adjacent images are views of a 3D environment created using Unity (Version 2019.3.11f1) with the use of Blender (Version 2.8) and Adobe Photoshop to model, texture and prototype the meshes. In addition to the aforementioned software used to build this environment, various add-ons within Unity were used to recreate the desired aesthetic of the environment.

While I was no stranger to creating, designing and producing realistic environments in VR, I decided to move out of my comfort zone to explore something, that at the time was a challenge - creating stylized 3D environment. The exercise was a way to explore the process of designing and creating stylized environment design and art. For more views of the environment, click here.

IDEATION

"I took inspiration from my childhood"

The main inspiration for the aesthetic of the environment came from studying the works of Genndy Tartakovsky, particularly the colour palettes and the sharpness of the forms used in his compositions. Since my environment was to feature man-made structures, I looked at the shape language and the way he rendered built forms in his work.

Above: A frame from Samurai Jack which was art-directed by Genndy Tartakovsky.

As a process, the first steps involved collecting credible references to establish the aesthetics of my scene in terms of colour palette, shape language, lighting and layout. I then created a blockout of the environment in Blender. This helped establish the general layout and scale of the space. The next step was to detail out the rough environment made in Blender.

Above: Quick sketches of what I wanted the shape language to be.

Above: Concepting and prototyping done in Blender.

PRODUCTION

"It was important to recreate the same aesthetic as that of the concept environment.”

Production was executed using Unity (Version 2019.3.11f1). The meshes once modelled and textured in Blender and Adobe Photoshop, were imported into Unity. A toon shader was used to create the materials for each of the meshes. The shader helped recreate the aesthetic seen in Genndy’s work.

Above: A shot of the final environment as seen in the Unity editor.

Above: A toon shader was used to create the materials. This allowed the shadows to be flat without any gradient.

To simulate volumetric fog, Aura, an add-on was used. The add-on has parameters to adjust the density of the fog volume, change colour as well as manipulate the proportions of the volume. In addition to this, post processing effects such as bloom were used to enhance the visuals.

Above: Aura, a volumetric fog add-on was used to generate fog volumes in the environment.