Style matrix - Project 2 - Fantasy shop

The first week of the second project is over already and with Halloween just gone Christmas is hurtling towards me at the speed of light. I can’t tell if I’m nervous because of the third year FMP or graduating and needing to find a real job or just the thought my higher education will be over. Either way focusing on the here and now the second of the 3 week projects has begun!

This time around I chose to go back to my comfort area in 3DS max and take on the ground floor shop front project. The brief asks for a fantasy styled shop front based in a non-realistic environment. It can be a maximum of 15,000 tris and has 4 1024 x1024 texture sheets. The final model must be displayed in Unreal 4 upon submission.

Naturally I started off looking for inspiration in the form of mood boards. The first two mood boards I assembled were a collection of dilapidated buildings with interesting architecture or particular eye catching features such as turrets, odd angles, weird locations and even trees and plants growing out of them. There were a couple of images that caught my attention such as the bright colour contrasts in the boat photographs. I really loved the rusting orange with the vivid blue sky or ocean. Something about ridiculously bright colours scream fantasy to me. Probably because it’s so uncommon to see colour palettes like that on buildings commonly, especially in the UK. On the mood boards I have circled the buildings of best interest to me in particular I really liked the building with high stacking tower turrets. Looking at the buildings reminded some people of the Russian buildings such as St. Basil's Cathedral located in Moscow. The geometrical shapes combined with the bright colour is exactly what I am looking to portray in my shop front so my third mood board is a collection of brightly coloured buildings with fantastical shapes, curves and designs to them.

decaying structure mood board 1

decaying structure mood board 2

Russian buildings inspiration board

From these mood boards I very roughly made thumbnail sketches of possible shop ideas. I still had no idea what I would be selling in this shop at this point. I was hoping the shape of the building might suggest content for the shop. I completed about 6 sketch ideas when Stash quite rightly suggested not to get fixated on stacking roofs and exterior building ideas. Focus more on the front door and display. Of course the surrounding building is important to suggest character but the front is specifically requested in the brief and so should be the focal point! From there my thumbnails homed in more on the display element using big curved windows interesting arched doorways and then the buildings evolved around them.

Continuing my thumbnail sketches I really liked the bulb shape, taken from the St Basils cathedral building in my mood boards, and decide to carry that forward in a few more of my experiments. Other buildings forms appear in the sketches too but none are as strong as the bulb. It’s around sketch 14 that the shop looks more and more like a sweet shop. The stripes and bright colours really lend themselves to this. However developing further to sketch number 15 that the idea of potions and smoke emitting from the top of a bottle emerged as a great looking idea. The shapes I like lend themselves perfectly to this and what is more fantastical than magic potions!

I really liked the last few designs I created in particular 20 and 18. I was torn as to which one would be better to develop. After asking for people’s opinions I concluded the squat appearance of 18 really focused in on the ‘shop front’ rather than the splendour of the building.

From this design I mocked up a few shapes in 3DS max and rendered a screen shot in order to paint over it to gain a better idea of the shop.

I then used this paint over to form the base of my colour experiments. I really wasn’t sure however which colours I should use so I set up a mini investigation whereby I took the brightest Russian building from my mood boards, colour picked from them, then flipped the hue to create a new set of bright and fantasy colouring. I then created swatches from these new images and used these colours to experiment with my colouring for the shop. Currently my favourite is the first selection of colours but I am unsure as to whether I will use them. I think this could use further development a bit later on.

colour investigation

potions shop colour experiments

By Friday I was happily working in 3D and fleshing out the shop with windows and doors the bare basics. Then I was given feedback by lecturer Custo who looked at my development and pointed out few little things that would help sell the concept as a building. Things like the gap between the door and the large bulb feature would normally be plugged up by an architect because otherwise rubbish and waste would collect there and practically it would be a high maintenance building. Also that the chimney stack seemed to not make sense going into the door way. In fairness I had spotted this earlier and decided it should curve and protrude from the black behind the door way instead of the door way. He then suggested I look at Spanish architect Antonin Gaudi for some of his fantastic curved and almost bonkers buildings. In particular I really liked the grand arches of Sagrada Familia ‘Holy Family’ ( Thank you Spanish lessons) I collated images I thought could feed into my shop front very nicely then went back to my paint over and re-sketched an alternate design on top of that. I only did the one rough mock up eliminating the pointy hat style roof I didn’t like in my concept. I also filled in gaps that would make it architecturally annoying and added a few extra features which I feel add to the appearance. This concludes my first week on the project. Next week I’m hoping to get some serious modelling done getting my model completed, unwrapped and semi textured by this following Friday.