12/02/2020
For the first project I want to put emphasis on the mood and ambience of my environment. I was inspired by the scenography of the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It is set in Los Angeles in the late 1960s, the so-called final years of Hollywood’s Golden Age. In the movie, the streets are filled with retro cars and palm trees on the side. Buildings such as diners, motels and restaurants are illuminated with colorful neon luminescent signs. I was especially drawn to the scenes that are set in the evening or at night, as they have a very particular feel and atmosphere.
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I then started looking for picture references and more inspiration for my own environment. I was looking at references from 1960s/1970s Los Angeles as well as modern day Cuba (as it is very much the same as in the 1960s). The images that spoke to me the most were the ones in sunset and I especially liked the colors of the sky and the clouds. Although in the beginning I was convinced that I would try to recreate a very realistic environment, I then realized that I would rather make something more dreamy and unrealistic. I decided that I would emphasize some aspects of a sunset such as lighting and colors so that it looks more vibrant and mesmerizing than in real life.
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Sunset in one of the favorite parts of my day and I enjoy taking some time to appreciate it whenever possible. Although I have seen some very beautiful and colorful sunsets, the overall ambience is almost never as intense and rich as in edited and enhanced pictures. Therefore, in my environment I will really emphasize the pink and purple tones in the sky and the clouds. The surroundings will be in line with the atmosphere of the movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The person will be standing in the middle of the road and will be looking at retro cars along the road, ocean in the distance, palm trees on both sides of the road and if possible – some buildings such as a diner or a motel with a neon sign by the road. The clouds will be pink and purple and the light will illuminate the road as well as the vast desert on the sides of the road.
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Here is the moodboard for my project with pictures that inspired me:
Here are the sketches of the assets:
Here is the storyboad:
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16/02/2020 UPDATE
Since starting to work on my project in Unity, I set myself the main goal of trying to get the overall environment as close as possible to what I had imagined and then concentrate on details. Therefore, I started by creating a desert which would be surrounding the road on both sides and would stretch until the horizon. For the desert, I created a plane and found a suitable texture that looked like sand which I applied to the plane. I then tried to figure out how to make a road in Unity and found a useful asset called “EasyRoads3D”. I watched and read through several tutorials on how to use this asset, however, unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work, as the roads would not appear in my game scene. I am still unsure about the reason for this issue and will talk to professor Sarah in class on Monday, February 17 about how to solve this.
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Besides trying to make a road, I started working on the lighting of my environment. It turned out to be quite challenging to achieve the pinkish dreamy ambience that I had imagined. Instead of being dreamy my attempts looked harshly pink and too unnatural (although I want the colors to be amplified, I also want to keep a sense of reality). I therefore added a sunset sky and pink lighting which reflects well on the sand and makes it look pink. I also added some palm trees in my scene and really liked how the pink light reflected on the palm trees, thus I am curious to see how the scene looks when I manage to add the road. I am hoping that it might look quite subtle as the road will naturally be dark and therefore absorb most of the pink light.
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For the upcoming days, I need to first figure out how to properly use the “EasyRoads3D” asset and make a road. Then I need to place palm trees along the road and either find a car asset or try to make one myself, as I still haven’t started doing that. I realized that having cars is not the most integral part of my environment, therefore I will leave that to the end and first concentrate on getting all the other components such as the desert, the road, the lighting and the palm trees right.
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18/02/2020 UPDATE
Since the last update I managed to figure out how to use the “EasyRoads3D” asset. The reason why it was previously not working was because I tried to add the road on a plane instead of a terrain which it is meant to be used on. Therefore, I changed the plane to a terrain and created a curvy road. I also managed to add a sand texture to the terrain which I could not figure out at first.
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Then I planted palm trees consistently along the road, alternating different styles of trees but mostly sticking to the most classic looking. After all the main assets were present in the scene I returned back to experimenting with lighting and trying to make it look more like I had envisioned and represented in my moodboard. However, it still wasn’t what I had imagined, thus, I scheduled a meeting with Sarah and went over some useful tips that could be done to change the overall lighting and color of the environment. I was very happy to find out that it is possible to change the coloring of a skybox in Photoshop because that helped me to achieve what I wanted. I used the same sunset skybox asset that I had previously found and changed the color balance, exposure, vibrance and brightness settings to match the skybox to the sky I had imagined.
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Lastly, I also experimented with the directional lights in the scene. I found that they work the best from the different lighting types available in Unity. I ended up using two directional lights and I placed one of them closer to the edge of the terrain on the lightest side of the sky. Because the sunset skybox that I am using already has a lighter side which looks like the sun is setting there, I decided to maximize that effect and emphasize the illusion of light falling from that direction. Therefore, the shadows from the palm trees fall in the “correct” direction and the scene looks more natural. The other directional light is pink and comes from the opposite side than the first directional light, therefore, creating an illusion of a pink reflection on the opposite side of the trees. Therefore, the other side of the road where the sun is not setting is much darker and more purple. I also tried baking the lighting, however, my computer’s processing power was not enough to be able to do it and after 6 hours of waiting I gave up, as it was still showing an estimated time of 20 hours.
