Creation Process

How my project was planned, applying inspirations, and difficulties along the way.

Concepts

Exploration of Ideas

At the beginning, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do. I was used to being given something to work off of because of my FMP, so I had a lot of ideas going through my head yet no clue where to begin. I wrote down some of the ideas I had, more specifically buildings, cultures/time periods, and structure, just to declutter my head in time for me to do my artist research. After doing my artist research I managed to narrow down my ideas into more specific ones. I knew I wanted to do something that was inspired by castles and cathedrals, and witchcraft.

My artist research helped me understand what I will be inspired by, what I still need to research, and the workflow I would do. I wanted to try out the workflow that Bethesda used to create Skyrim, take inspiration from real-life cultures and buildings that Genshin Impact did, and to apply the story and clues into my environment like OMORI has done.

Though it was a short process, it was extremely important to rule out what I wanted to do, this is useful so that I do not spend time on things that will not apply in any way to my final piece. It also helped me get into the right headspace to work towards a certain goal.

Planning

My main points of planning were: story, environment structure, and buildings/details. I split these up into 3, but still worked in the order listed as my story will apply to my environment and so on. I kept a notebook and sketchbook with all of my plans so everything was in one place and I had access to it easily at all times.

Story

The overall idea of my story is:

- The main character sets out on an adventure to figure out her ancestry and background.

- In a cave, she discovers a large palace surrounded by plants and crystals, a path leading towards it and it is "trapped in time".

- She looks around various rooms, completing puzzles and quests given by the creatures inhabiting the palace.

- As she gets closer to the item she is searching for, more and more details of her origin begin to show up.

- She discovers the item in the back right tower, and understands where she comes from.

^ A small community of witches under the disguise of being royalty, who researched and protected against evil spirits and their

crystallising powers. This group was then cast into a cave never to be seen again. The cause for this is using the item as protection from a natural disaster that would have wiped them out, though this ended up backfiring and killing them slowly instead as they could not leave the cave (it was their fate).

The story is quite broad in terms of environment, and has a variety of different ways to present it. This made it a lot easier to plan my environment and buildings. Knowing the story, I can apply it into the environment and design things with the idea that I have to tell this specific story within it, and represent it correctly. I did this by using colours, lighting, and making sure my designs link to it.

Environment Structure

This was probably the hardest thing for me to plan. With the others, I could write down ideas and then come up with something, or create sketches to decide what I want to do exactly. For environment structure, it was a bit different. I used cubes and moved them around on 3dsMax to map out the kind of shape I wanted my cave to be, I needed it to sort of wrap around

the castle in the middle.

I knew that I wanted to add plants and crystals, to make sure that it looked like they grew out

naturally I needed to add some slopes and ledges, and make some corners/edges that the crystals

can "grow out" of. It was fairly easy to do when I got into it, but quite tedious as I had to move

around each individual vertex to make it look as good as possible. For the placement of plants and

crystals, I left that for later. I did this because it would make it easier to see how the final product

would look as the difference between how it looks untextured to texture is huge.

Buildings + Other Items

I knew what I wanted to do for this already, so planning the layout was fast. I had to separate each part and decide what exactly I wanted them to be.

- Main Hall

- Light Towers

- Front Towers

- Observatory

- Witches Room

- Item Room

- Bell Tower

- Castle Walls

I tried to arrange these in a way that made sense if it were a playable game, the sections that revealed more to the player are further in. Although I did not end up doing the inside of the castle, I still wanted to plan something out to understand how the structure would look like from the outside.

Inside layout plan

Castle layout plan

Concepts

This was the part where I had the most fun. Exploring different designs and ideas of what I could add into my project was really exciting, especially because I knew I had to make them come to life.

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Tree Concepts

Deciding what to do for each aspect of my environment required a lot of exploration and coming up with different ideas to see what worked with it the best. Most of these I didn't even use, but that is what this stage is meant to be: exploring different ideas and coming up with concepts to be able to finalise a design. It was fun to create different things and take inspiration from other video games and artists to apply onto my own work.

The most important one for me was creating designs for the castle. I am using real-life castles and cathedrals as inspiration and wanted to apply certain aspects of them into my own work, e.g. panels on the Kazan Cathedral in Moscow. I managed to do this appropriately by sketching out various parts of each castle/cathedral and then using it as reference for designing my own castle.

Character Concept

I will be honest and say that I was not able to add the character that I had a concept for into my final piece, however I do still want to talk about it since it helped me develop my ideas.

Concept 1 Concept 2 Concept 3 (Final Design)

I explored 3 different designs for a character. Concept 1 is inspired by sailor uniforms, raincoats and futuristic designs so that it would contrast the older designs of the environment. Concept 2 is inspired by mages and medieval witch clothing, with gold details to represent wealth but also clothing the poorer people wore in those times. Concept 3 is the final one I chose. Since the whole idea of my game is to do with witchcraft, this character appeals to me and seems like it would fit in the most. This design was mostly inspired by how witches are depicted in modern media, I wanted to do this to contrast the older designs on the environment, showing my "trapped in time" idea. I also added a rune onto her neck, as I will have runes on some objects in my scene which shows her connection to the place even more.

I then coloured the design in 3 different colourways and asked people in my class to pick which one they liked the most. The middle one got the most votes, whilst the left one got none at all. I think it is important to ask other people about their opinions on my work so I can appeal to the right audience, my primary one being ages 13-34 which my classmates fall into. I believe the middle design was the most liked because the hair contrasts the clothing more than the other two.

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Creation

Castle

After deciding the layout and coming up with ideas, I started modelling. The castle is the main exploration point of the game, so I had to make sure it had an interesting design that peaked peoples interests. Each area should have its own purpose and reasons for being included in the design, also taking into account how the floor plan would work and how the story will progress. The front areas having less information, and the further you go in and explore, the more you find out.

Front Towers

This is the first part of the castle that I designed. Most of it is inspired by Peles Castle, with the roof inspired by the Mahabat Maqbara Palace. I found it fun to experiment with different shapes and arranging them in way that unifies them instead of looking like a mess of different shapes and sizes. The windows were inspired by stained glass windows, which I tried to replicate by using sharp edges in most of the shapes to mimic pieces of glass. The design is a moon with the shades of the night sky in a gradient behind it, the moon is largely included in witchcraft so I thought this would suit the design best. However, I would've liked to make it more detailed. To do this, I need to master painting UV maps instead of using substance painter as my actions are limited.

Bell Tower

I had 2 separate designs for the bell tower. One was inspired more by the upturned roofs of Imperial buildings and Indian architecture, whilst the other was inspired by more European castles. I decided to go with the latter, it was easier to model and also gave me the idea of "stuck in time" with the clocks around it, with the bell also signifying something to do with this as they are usually struck at specific times. For the writing on the bell, I wrote "Interconnected by Magic" in runes, magic is widely used in witchcraft.

Castle Walls

These were heavily inspired by the two Russian Cathedrals had researched: St. Basil's Cathedral, and Kazan Cathedral in Moscow. It was mainly inspired by the Kazan Cathedral, I found the walls really interesting with how they were shaped and how they looked. However, instead of windows I made sort of a mural, with a rune in each section, doing the same for the panels at the bottom of the wall. I used Peorth (Divination, Luck), Wunjo (Heritage), and Thurisaz (Protection).

I decided to use these because they connected to the story the most, being cast into a dangerous place, wanting to escape, and seeking answers about her heritage.

Observatory

The observatory was mostly just a design that came from my head, however the panelling was inspired by Peles castle once again. I made a dome shape, and then another to orbit around the top of the structure, to resemble the orbit of planets. Telescopes are used for astrology, so I tried to make the floor on top to look like the night sky with stars across it. This was another thing I could improve on, in the future I would like to explore using Blender to make special materials and textures that resemble my idea more.

Front Wall

The door was my main focus for this part, I designed the front to resemble 2 moons and 3 suns, which could be used for the main residents of the castle in the past. After a little I realised it sort of looks like the holy trinity symbol, this was not intentional but I think it's a cool detail. The roofing for this area is tiered and slightly upturned, like the Jiayuguan Fortress.

Pillar Towers

These were inspired by the Mahabat Maqbara Palace, which I used quite frequently for my roofing, however this is inspired it as a whole. Taking into account how I wanted the inside to look like, I made this without walls and instead used pillars to mimic that whilst also being able to put natural light into the main hall of the palace. Even though it is quite plain, I think it ties the front area together.

Top Tower

The top tower is meant to hold the large talisman that brings the residents hope for the protection of the castle and also being able to leave the cave. Therefore, I needed to make sure it was easily visible from several angles of the castle. I made 4 open areas in the main places where people would look at it. This tower was a mix of most of the buildings I had researched, which was quite fun to do. The windows are made to look like stars, specifically if you were to look at the Milky Way. However, I think this area looks quite bland and I'd need to improve my focus on areas that are first seen by the eye rather than sub areas.

After finishing, I arranged it all in the places that I had planned

beforehand. However at this stage I realised that some parts

were probably unnecessary to keep in, so I removed them.

What was originally meant to be the Witches Room and Item

Room I had to remove. I wanted these things to be hidden in

other areas and to not make it as obvious to the player where

the main areas were meant to be. I decided these were

probably best to hide away within the castle elements I had

finished, also as I was on a time constraint and wanted to work

as efficiently as possible.

The red figure is meant to be used as a scale for how big the character would be in proportion to the castle. I needed it to be huge and intimidating, showing how much power royalty has over regular people.

Tree

This tree takes up the majority of space in the environment, so I needed to

make the design unique and interesting. In the beginning, I knew that I

wanted it to form around the entire cave, so for this I used a plane to

replicate the shape of the caves ceiling and drew on top of that. I came up

with a design that's curved and grows anti-clockwise. Afterwards, I thought

my idea could be improved by using the Fibonacci sequence which is

frequently seen in nature, but I could also make it look fantastical. The blue

is the main large branch that is in the shape of the sequence, then I

randomly placed smaller branches growing out of it, still keeping the idea

of branches curving anti-clockwise. Based off of this, I could then add in the

main, thicker branches that would support the top. After planning all of this,

I gave it life and put it into Blender, added the

skin modifier and worked off of that. I then tried

to mould it to look more natural, whilst also

being careful that it did not collide with any of

the castles structures, just like how plants would

grow around buildings. An issue that I ran into

whilst applying the modifier is that it produced

a lot of rats nests around some of the branches.

Fixing this was quite time consuming, so in the

future I would like to learn how to use this modifier properly and efficiently to make my workflow smoother

and preventing spending too much time on one thing that could be spent doing other tasks. When texturing,

I was stuck between the idea of making it a crystallised tree or making it look more realistic. I settled for

something in the middle. I textured the tree to look like purple bark, and then made it shiny to create the

illusion of it starting to crystallise on the surface from being underground for so long. This was probably my

favourite thing to model, it was outside of my comfort zone but I am really happy with how it turned out.

Original Idea

Before - 40k+ polys

After - 12k+ polys

After skin modifier, changed level of branches

Added shapes to simulate leaves, moving around to get the right appearance

Talisman

The ram horn in the middle is the main focus of this object, ram horns are important in many religions and cultures, usually seen as a symbol of rebirth or fertility. In ancient Egypt, the God Amon is depicted with a ram's head. Amon was known as 'King of The Gods', which shows strength and continuity, exactly what the people in the castle need to succeed in going back to the over world.

The other 3 materials used in the talisman are pearl, wood, and jade. In my original plan, I wanted to make the main 'rope' of it a dark teal, but once texturing I decided to swap it to brown wood as it works with the colours better, and shows my idea of nature more clearly. Jade is used in a various cultures, but my main focus is Chinese culture. Specifically green jade was used for the dead, which is foreshadowing for what happened to the castle's residents. Pearls are also found in water, which is the opposite to my environment, so it further shows the magical aspect of the residents that lived there, and also that they used to live on the surface at some point in time.

Final Render

Base Colours Textured

Cave

This was the first thing that I modelled for my environment. Because cave walls and structures are quite unpredictable, I could do pretty much anything I wanted to. I still kept the idea of what a real cave looks like and how stone walls are shaped, though I exaggerated the edges and points. Originally, I was going to keep it low poly, but after texturing it in substance painter, I didn't like the outcome so I had to come up with another plan on the spot. This was the first time I used Blender, it was difficult to get used to the controls and understand the UI but I got the hang of it eventually which was extremely useful as it has settings that 3dsMax does not. Learning both programs is going to be useful for me in the future as I can have even more possibilities to improve my work by using different techniques and skills between the two.

Using Blender, I used the geometry node editor to mess around with the different tabs and ended up with a texture that I liked. What is good about this is that it does not just add the texture, it changes the whole mesh to look like the texture. However, this does result in really high poly counts, in the future I would need to figure out how to fix this, making my models as low poly as possible so that any games I create wouldn't need extremely powerful PCs to run.

Plants

As previously mentioned, I wanted to take a lot of inspiration from real life objects and nature. For my flora, I found some plants and fungi that interested me, took inspiration by how they looked and applied it to make my own. After making some basic models, I edited them to

suit how I wanted them to look like exactly. I settled on the colour scheme for all of my

natural elements at this point, the colours being pink, blue, and purple. Since I needed the

natural environment to look otherworldly, I chose this colour scheme as purple is opposite

green (the most common colour found in nature) on the colour wheel, with blue and pink next to it. Coming up with ideas for this came quite easy to me, researching different

plants and fungi was interesting and broadened my knowledge on how many possibilities

there can be for nature in environment design. Even if I did not change the colours or

shapes of them, they still look like something that does not exist on this planet.

Basic Models of Plants and Fungi

Witches Cap Mushroom

One of the main themes of my game is witches and their

practices, I found this mushroom commonly known as

"Witches Cap" because of its shape. Another characteristic

is that it blackens as it edges, which reminds me of fire or

burning, and sort of like magic. I took inspiration from the

shape of it, and even added the gills underneath the cap to

make it as close as possible. I also changed the colour

scheme to fit my fantasy environment more, purple blue

and pink, which are the main three colours that I used throughout the designs for my plants and natural aspects.

Original Sketch Adapted

Blue Milk Cap Mushroom

This mushroom is really interesting and unique to me. The colour blue is rarely found in places apart from water sources, and the holes in it make it look otherworldly. I thickened out the stalk so it would not look too similar to both the original or the witches cap. I also changed the pattern from holes, to crescent moon shapes to suit the witchcraft theme more. This is probably my favourite out of all the plants that I designed, the crescent shapes were made by mistake, but I ended up liking it so I kept that for my design.

Original Sketch Adapted

Fiddlehead Fern

I first discovered this plant whilst playing Stardew Valley. At

first, I thought it was a made up plant, but it turns out it is

real, and that fascinated me. The way it curls around does

not look like something you would expect to see on Earth.

I adapted this a little differently than the other two, instead

of the stem curling around itself, I added a spiky sphere in

the middle to represent it. The colourway I chose doesn't

really look like the inspiration, but all of my plants needed to make colour schemes with each other.

Original Sketch Adapted

Cotton Flower

For this plant, I was inspired by cotton flowers, they're

unique in their own way, but almost everyone knows what

they look like. I adapted this by changing the colour scheme

like I did for the others, and changed the shape of the

cotton itself by making it more lumpy and overlapped

instead of the orderly formation of real cotton flowers. I also

made them much bigger to add to the fantasy aspect.

Lilac Coral Fungus

When looking for inspiration, I discovered this fungus. I wanted to add something to do with the sea but I thought it would look really out of place. But then, I found this, it resembles coral a lot but it is actually a fungus. I found it fun to move around all of the stems and get them into a chaotic order. This helped when I was placing them around the environment as I was able to rotate them and combine several into one so that it was not repetitive.

Original Sketch Adapted

Crystals

Pre-Texturing, Categorised in size and type

Rendered

Modelling the crystals was fairly easy, again learning

Blender was useful for making simple object like these

where you need a variety of distorted shapes. After

making around 18 singular crystals, I created 4

categories to sort them out into which made it much

easier to texture and move around in the end.

I explored different types of texturing by mixing materials and masks in Substance Painter, making 2 main ones: one that was more shaded and one that was mainly the same colour. I decided to use the one that was more shaded, taking into account that I wanted to make them light up my scene, I had to make them have a variety of shades so that when the light shines through it, the crystals still have depth and texture to them.

Moving these around and placing them in the correct place took some time, I needed to make sure they light up the right places but also that the colours were balanced all around the scene. Before rendering, I also went around my 3 different cameras to make sure there was a good amount of crystals for each, adding in any that I needed to finish.

Final Design

Natural Environment - Render Preview

Scene 1

Scene 2

Final Castle Model

Scene 3

Then, I put everything together and ended up with the final result. I'm quite happy with how it turned out, although it is not what I had imagined it to end up like, I am still very content with it. When placing the different plants and crystals, I had to strategically arrange them so they looked both natural, but also balanced out. The large plants make the cave look more "tight" however this leads you to the point of interest, and they are all placed to either point to the castle or direct your eyes towards it. I also used the rule of thirds to set my camera angles depending on where I wanted the focus to be.

I also had to consider how it would be played if it were a real video game, the placement of the objects in the environment needed to be thought about carefully. I asked myself questions like: "How would the character move around the area?", "How would the player know where to go?", and "How would the character explore the area?". This decided how I placed everything, I had to make sure the main focus was the castle, that there was a clear route of how to get there, and how different movement mechanics (such as jumping, climbing, and swinging) would be used in the environment. The plants and crystals are all at different levels which makes it easy to reach high areas like the vines and tree branches where hidden objectives/items could be hidden.

Figuring out how to do the lighting was an extremely important thing to do. The environment is meant to look colourful, otherworldly, and almost alien-like to bring the theme of fantasy as much as possible. This could result in a variety of different types of lighting, but I also had to consider some other factors. No manmade light sources, ambient lighting so it feels more comforting, and brings about the feeling of interest. I had 2 different ideas: making the crystals light up, or adding a hole in the ceiling to let natural light in. After thinking of the story behind the area, only the first one would make sense, since if there were a hole they could easily leave.

Animation

Fiddleheads

The technique that I used to animate the fiddleheads was something that I hadn't intended to do. In the beginning I wanted them to sway, but looking back on it I believe the final result is better, since there is no wind in the cave there isn't a way for such large plants to sway. By using the rotate tool I managed to give it the look of wiggling around like jelly almost. This worked out in my favour since I wanted to make the plant slimy.

Talismans

This was the simplest thing to animate since they are just turning in a circle. The only thing that I had to consider was weight of the items. Making the smaller ones move faster than the large talisman in the middle since they are lighter.

Clock

In order to show one of my themes "stuck in time", I decided that the first scene would be of the clock ticking. In my design of the clock, every number is replaced with the word "NOW" in runes. I was inspired by broken clocks that are constantly ticking in one place and cannot move out of that specific place. This shows both the theme of being stuck in time and also that the residents could not leave.

Door Crystals

Animating the crystals falling was the most difficult out of all the animations I did. When

coming up with the idea for this, I wanted it to represent the main character opening up

and exploring her heritage. It shows that her and her ancestors deeply want to unite, as something that is crystallised does not come apart so easily. It also serves as a guide to exactly where the player needs to go without directly telling them to, because a door that was shut close by natural elements suddenly is free to be opened. It makes the player intrigued as to what could be hiding in there.

As for why it was difficult, I had to consider 2 main things, weight and collisions. When the crystals start to fall they go in all sorts of directions, but I had to make sure everything was falling correctly and that nothing clipped within each other or the floor. I also had to take into account of how the crystals would change course and speed when colliding with each other. I managed to make only a few collide as they all fell at different times rather than at once to make it seem more natural.

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