Backyard Slice PBR Project - Concept + Brief

 Backyard Slice PBR Project - Concept + Brief

Garden Sketch:

Going into this project, I had a couple of ideas floating around for what I wanted for my outcome. I knew I wanted something either traditional or nature inspired as I think that nature gives the best reference material for weird and wacky forms, shapes and structures, so I began there. With a name like "Backyard slice" it was very hard not to consider my own backyard at home, which I am very fortunate to have. unfortunately it is nearly winter at this point so the garden looks quite life less, so I had to look at photos from previous years to find something to work with. 

My garden has a narrow section at the side of the house which features a raised bank and a pergola connecting to the fence and the house, so in the summer it creates a beautiful archway with grape vines over a picnic bench sat in a small gravel area. The area of the garden has plant life everywhere, making for a large variety of different sizes, shapes and colours of foliage available. we also have a magnolia tree which comes out in wonderful pink flowers that I thought might work as an asset. 

I began sketching it out, using references from the garden, and I ran into a couple of constraints off of the bat. The slice has to take up a 8m cube - which means that it was quite hard to make the shapes intersect in an interesting and non clumsy way. I proposed the sketch to Kat and Pat, and was advised that because the brief is about working with tiling textures and trim sheets having a very plant heavy composition may result in the tri budget being taken up in areas that are not going to be prioritised in grading; basically it was a time sink for not much gain. So I scrapped this idea, but still had a very basic sketch to use as a back up if nothing came to me.

English Back garden Sketch

Tokyo Back Alley:

my second idea was very different. This idea oriented on taking a urban environment that was very recognisable in location, and then adding some elements of focus to make the area seem like a point of interest in the world. I knew I would be removing most organic elements, and I wanted to instead create a thematic contrast between old and new; traditional and modern. I did some research into shrines in Japan and found Inari shrines which are one of the most common across all of Japan. They are even found in some corporate offices, so I thought that a shrine could be found in a back street. 

Inari shrines are characterised by the central shrine building or location, with a pair of fox statues nearby. A iconic Torii gate can often be seen as an entrance to the shrine location. I drew a lot of inspiration from ghost of Tsushima for the scale of the shrine which I believe is called a "Hokora" shrine.

Tokyo Backstreet V1

UE4 Blockout

I had an image to overlay of a enclosed backstreet in Tokyo, and I simply made changes like swapping a noodle bar out for the shrine to create this new scene version. Importantly, this scene is very narrow with extremely tall walls since the sides are sky scrapers - and when I moved to create a block out of this in ue4 it did not have the impact of my sketch because of the 8 metre restriction on all axis. I also noticed that because there is a wall on either side it becomes really difficult to view the shrine from any angle
that isn't outside the scene, which would scupper my plans for making anything in that area that is detailed. When I approached Kat and Pat with this they agreed also, and so I began another sketch in an isometric view to make sure that all the elements I drew could actually be seen in the scene. This was backed up when I transferred this to a UE4 blockout, which was also a chance to test lighting set ups in the scene.

Isometric Scene Sketch

Isometric Scene Blockout

Next Steps:

The next steps I see for this project is to transfer my very basic blockout into 3ds max so I can begin modelling assets to scale. I feel particularly inspired at the idea of sculpting the fox statues since I have just come off of sculpting my pumpkin, so I will likely tackle that in my next post.