Golden, Silver or Wood?
Project Description
Once upon a time, a man had a tree branch which looked common but was left by his mother. One day he accidentally lost the tree branch in water and found himself somehow trapped on a little island. Then he came across a water god who found three tree branches for him, among which one is golden, one is silver and another one is ordinary. And it was the time for him to make a choice.
I made this story as the background for my alternate world and it was adapted from a traditional myth. The identity I want to show is mysterious fantasy with uncertainty. It should raise the curiosity, look explorable but feel abnormal at some point. I would say it’s not a fancy and harmless fairy tale, but somewhere that can have potential dangers or unknown results.
Process and Implementation
I firstly created the terrain and built the water surface with online assets. But to increase the immersive feeling, I also tried to fill up the space above. So I made the 3D model of a group of clouds in Rhino and then imported them into Unity. I decided to apply water material to them as well. In this case, the floating clouds can also be viewed as bubbles, which can indicate the unrealistic and alternate part of the environment. And it also raised the question that whether it is on a piece of real land or in an underwater world.
Besides the model of clouds, I also made this human face model to represent the water god role in my alternate world. It is in low poly and I still applied the water material to match his identity. Since it would be boring if it’s simply static, I modified the material and changed parameters to separate parts of his face, which makes him more dynamic and vivid as a floatable and abstract god figure. I made this face super big compared with other elements, so that he can be emphasized in the whole scene and it also indicates the god power is beyond imagination. Moreover, the face doesn’t look benign and I did this on purpose to make the whole thing less harmless.
To create a spacious view with spatiality, I tried to make the plants relatively small than the landscape and also played around the field view of the camera a lot. However with a larger field view, there will be more easily distorted view at the corner when rotating the camera. So I changed back the camera view to normal. One more detail about the plants is the contradiction between the two islands, where one is full of withered plants while the other is more vividly growing. It’s one more setting I made aimed to make the world feel tricky and abnormal.
For the three tree branches, I picked the tree branch model and applied three different materials. I also added emission to make themselves glow a little bit. To further highlight them, I made three glowing water spheres to wrap them. To decide the position of these three spheres took me a while. Initially I placed them in front of the god in a row, but I found it would cover part of the god face and look disconnected in the scene. So I then placed them surrounding the camera in three directions. In this case, when the camera rotates, there can always be one of them as a main object in the field view. I believe can add to mystery and raise some curiosity.
As for the skybox, I meant to make the surroundings dark with the only strong light behind the god face. And the light look extremely strong when the user faces the god directly. And it functions similarly as the exaggerated size of god face. Also I manipulated the directional light mainly to make the environment dark but some building details still visible.
Lastly, since my water is very dynamically floating, so I think adding some audio can help strengthen the immersive feeling. So there’s also some peaceful water floating sound in the background.
Reflection
The final result is very close to my initial assumption, since when I look around, the mixed feelings include the desire to explore, the hesitation to break the current peace, the slight fear to face the water god directly and the joy to enjoy the appealing fantasy. I don’t have much curiosity because I know what’s going on here, but from user experience testing, people will always be curious for the first time. I think these feelings can match the identity I set because fantasy brings delight and joy while uncertainty brings fear and suspect. However, since I have a lot of real-time reflection in my project and it takes time to render, when I open the file on PC, it would be awkward to turn around because the views change slowly. But I assume the reader on Android phone with Google Cardboard can be much better and smoother.