OUAN504 - Environment Design

Based on my experience last year with my final project involving 3D spaces and environment design, we decided it would be a good opportunity to allow me to pursue this a little further through this project and undertake some of the environment design for the one minute short we are making. At this point we plan to model the interior of the barn that the pigs will be kept in and it is also where a large portion of the narrative and action will take place - hence the effort being put in to this specific environment. The way I plan to manage it, is to start with research. Looking at different barns, how they're laid out and what is kept inside them. From here I will decide what's relevant to us and what would be an appropriate work load to undertake, for example not cramming too many objects into the space and having to model them all in a short amount of time, but still managing to make it look interesting and like a barn. From here I will do some area plans of the barn containing the objects that we think would be good to have and we can decide on a final layout before going into the modelling stage. The design process for the making of the environment involves looking at shapes of barns, colour schemes, and lighting. These are the three aspects I had in mind when creating thumbnails to work from. I started by using references in combination with my mood boards and a lot of secondary resources online to look at the kind of viable designs barns had around the world, specifically America as they are familiar and almost stereotypical of what an audience expects a barn to look like due to their common placement in feature films and television series. My idea here was to keep it looking fairly generic, especially since the animation is so short any environmental shots will be quick, so the information and design needs to be communicated as fast as possible to the audience - nothing over complicated here just an interesting and suitable design was all that was necessary. I sketched out the thumbnails of ten different ideas, barns with various different roofs, different dimensions and heights, with windows and entrances in different places. I then took it a little further in order to explore it a little more by adding overhangs and various other details that could be interesting to the audience and make the whole environment come alive. I also tried to make sure that the perspective was fairly accurate to gather a sense of scale and size whilst also trying to sketch the designs using interesting viewpoints, again to gather a greater sense of how they look from a 3D perspective rather than a flat 2D image. I used a very quick and simple method of depicting shadows using pencil and pen to enforce the initial ideas I had for lighting and its direction. During the process I was trying to envision how objects would translate to 3D and be as thorough as possible with planning. From last year I've realised when trying to make something in 3D whether it's 3D modelled using modelling software or a physical model built by hand it has to look and feel real, as if it would be sized up and placed in the real world, which is really what I wanted to achieve with my first attempt at a detailed Maya model. Once the thumbnails were complete I spent a couple of hours detailing colour and lighting into them using Photoshop. This method of adding colour digitally allowed me to experiment with different lighting for each thumbnail as well as smaller details such as shadows, lighting from inside the barn and other environmental details such as weather, the moon and trees or grass. Through this process I think I had a much greater understand of how I was going to approach the task and the kind of things I wanted to include in the scene. Although, it was also important to understand limitation with the project, whether they are time, processing power and memory when it comes to rendering the scene and my own skill limitations. For example, it would be unreasonable to add multiple trees to the scene as it would take a long time to render frames and it's an unnecessary feature or isn't worth the trouble - these aspects were taken into account.



Below are the thumbnail sketches followed by the colour and lighting experimentation that was done. It's interesting how adding lighting, colour and shadows the images really start to come together. Furthermore, by doing the design stage this way I gathered a better understanding of the benefits of thumb-nailing, idea generation and it's contribution to the final outcome.