UNTITLED

R&D for an ongoing personal research project.

Research

This work is part of a long-form, intermittent personal project developed during my MFA. Thematically it draws from disparate sources; planetarium projectors (see Zeiss project), the pastel architectural features of a North Korean theater, set design of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the photography of Robert Polidori, among others.

I was motivated to use newly learned workflows and skills during the lockdown to depict a scene at a greater level of fidelity and complexity than I had up until that point.

Development

At the beginning of the project, I had expected to cut time spent on modeling and overall production by focusing on using procedural textures, normal maps, displacement to fake geometry where possible. However, the process and the fidelity I was aiming to achieve required a lot of additional learning through trial and error. During development, this led to a more thorough understanding of how to quickly iterate on and work in a more procedural manner.

Refinement

This type of material production afforded me a lot of flexibility. Using custom height maps and Substance Painter materials, I could more quickly experiment with color pallets and material types before settling on the final composition and set up of the scene.