Description
Walking in a modern metropolis, do you find yourself “lost” in the big city sometimes? On one hand, one can literally get lost among the streets downtown since the buildings and street furniture are often similar and constructed in a unified pattern. On the other hand, at least for me, once in a while I would get struck by a sense of loneliness when wandering in the street and having no clue about where to go. I think this feeling of getting lost is partially invoked by the imposing buildings around us. They are so tall and magnificent that their very existence blocks our view of the sky and our imagination about the rest of the world. Therefore, in this project I choose to build a grandiose environment and try to convey the feeling of getting lost around the buildings.
Inspiration: View of the imposing building from a distance 
Inspiration: Lost in the street surrounded by buildings
For this project, I intend to imitate the streets of the big city while constructing it in a cyberpunk style. Cyberpunk strikes me as “high tech, low life” and the existence of every single human being is trivial compared with advanced technology and hyper-urbanized landscape. It resonates with the identity that I want to achieve. From my point of view, reminding people of how small they are in this virtual space is one important factor for the sense of “grandiose” identity. Thus, I use the architecture of cyberpunk skyscrapers as a critical feature of my environment.
Process and Implementation
- Views of Audience
The most important view in my environment is the view of a street and the skyscraper one can see at the end of the street. The street is very narrow and the buildings are close to each other to make it overwhelming for the audience. The ascending height of the buildings is leading one’s view to gradually look upwards. If the audience is equipped with a VR device, he/she will have to look up very hard to see the top of the skyscraper.
As for other views when the audience turns around, I think it would be boring to see similar street scenes. After all, I want to keep some imagination about the outside world. Therefore, I make it possible for the audience to look further beyond the city by placing the camera at the top of a lower house. From this view (View A), the audience would realize that the city is isolated in the middle of the sea. I intend to blur the division between land and sea and thus block the audience’s view of the land boundary with several houses.
View A is set to be the first view of the audience when the environment is launched and there are no tall buildings in this scene. I design it this way so that when the audience explores the whole environment, there is a contrast between the first impression and the actual vibe. In View A, one has a wide view of the mountains in the distance and even the skyline. However, in View B, one could hardly see the sky and sunset but only see the buildings at a very close distance. In View C, the last glimmer of twilight disappears and the audience could only see the imposing skyscrapers.
- Lighting Settings
For the skybox of my environment, each of the two below has its merits. They both have a dark color theme (the sunset skybox is mainly dark with twilight around skyline). I like the dark theme a lot because the skyscrapers seem to extend endlessly to the further sky against the dark background. With the cloudy night skybox, the sea seems more realistic since the water (as a 3D object) blends in with the background. However, eventually I choose the sunset skybox because of the contrast effect mentioned above.
Skybox 1: Sunset 
Skybox 2: Cloudy night
For the environment reflections, they usually come with skybox packages. But the skybox that I choose doesn’t include reflection, so I try to choose a suitable one from another package. At last, I choose Reflection 3 as it matches best with the skybox with a cool tone. The dark reflection on the glass creates a feeling that there are more tall buildings on the opposite side (although actually there are no tall buildings on that side).
Reflection 1 
Reflection 2 
Reflection 3: Dark tone, raindrops on the ground have clear reflection
Feedback and Reflection
In general, to highlight the grandiose architecture, I focus on the contrast between a) depths of views; b) heights of buildings; c) color themes of different altitudes. According to several user tests, I get the feedback that the contrast between the first view and other views with tall building works well. Initially, I want the mountains to be further from the audience so that the contrast between depths of view could be stronger. However, it seems that Unity only renders scenes and objects in a limited scope. I tried to add fogs in the distance to increase the depth of the view but I couldn’t get volumetric fogs working.
The skyscrapers are grandiose and imposing enough to achieve the identity that I intended. The color theme of the skybox and the environment also contributes to the lonely, lost feeling. But the twilight of the skybox seems a bit too bright. Sarah suggests that I edit it in software like Photoshop since it has nothing to do with the light source in the environment. Moreover, to strengthen the lost feeling, I think I could add some fog effect to the whole environment. Raindrops on the road is one of my attempts to create a cool and humid vibe but I think there are other lighting settings to help create that feeling as well.