Assignment: Environment Design
Tools: Procreate, iPad, Apple Pencil Pro, Minecraft, Desktop PC
Description: The Academy of Alchemy is at the forefront of magical and scientific achievement. Being the premiere academic institution for all seeking to learn the ways of both fantastical sorcery and the mechanisms of the natural world (science). The shown room is one of many study lounges for hardworking spell casters to read the texts of wisdom passed down from sorcerers of old.
Feedback: This room is really inspired by the library in Hollow Bastion from Kingdom Hearts, although I intentionally tried not to look at gameplay as to not be too directed towards what that game has already done (although I’m sure this vibe is still pretty similar to what’s featured in that game). At the same time, I was really also thinking about NYU’s Bobst library. I remember getting some work done in one of the reading rooms that had gigantic windows, and I wanted to incorporate that into my aesthetic. Of course, I also looked at other references. While I had some references of grand libraries in France, I also found someone’s personal library that gave me a nice cozy feel I also wanted to incorporate.
I started mocking up two floor plans, which I featured above. Then, I went into Minecraft to block out both versions of the room. While I initially used Minecraft in the hopes of having a little bit of fun with the assignment, I quickly found that the aesthetics of Minecraft kindve naturally matched what I was going for, especially when it came to the actual walls and shelves of the room. Naturally, though, Minecraft is pretty rigid otherwise, and I struggled getting the tables and chairs to feel inspired due to my limited toolset. Still, Minecraft was really useful even on the simple level of blocking stuff out. I initially didn’t intend to make the room so large (height-wise), but seeing the room in Minecraft got me excited about bookshelves towering above someone standing on the floor - so the blockout helped me make creative decisions in the moment.
I wanted both versions of the room to have something really awe-inspiring about them, so I included a tree in one version of the room, and floor-to-ceiling windows in the other. I think it might be nice to tribute something magical to the tree in further iterations - make it a tree with magic swirling around it, for example.
Finally, after I blocked out the rooms, I rendered both of them with a PoV. This was a huge struggle for me. First, I had to render the room in POV. Then I had to render props in POV. I think I might have fallen apart a little here, and really struggled with the rendering - but, at the very least, I hopefully got the hierarchy of objects across.
Here is the blockout and rendering for room one (3 Minecraft pictures, one procreate picture), room two (3 Minecraft pictures, one procreate picture), and my references: