Collin Yoshida - Hayward Observatory 2

The goal of this project was to use a previously created building/ environment and envision it from a new perspective. This was accomplished by expanding the 3D environment to show the forest and mountains, and introducing 2 new areas, The Bridge and The Water Refinery. These additions show that the environment is self-sufficient in this beautiful but eerily post-apocalyptic area.

The Bridge - While creating the environment, I made sure that everything was scaled to the player's height and fun to walk around in. While the final concept painting is from a bird's eye point of view, I like to imagine how this area would be traversed in a game as a 3D environment.

The Water Refinery - A technical challenge creating this 3D environment was scattering instances of grass and trees all over the landscape. I was able to accomplish this by creating a particle system in Blender on the objects that made up the environment and weight painting where the trees should and should not be placed. Because of how dense the trees were, if I were to create a similar 3D landscape again, I would spend more time creating assets with varying levels of quality to scatter in the background.

The lighting and scene changed a lot throughout the environment redesign, with the 2 shots above showing my technique and thought process. On the left is an early progress version of the scene with block-out shapes and hand-placed trees, and on the right is the radio telescope with a shader to add small cracks to the dish. Early on, many challenges arose, such as how to scatter enough trees to make a convincing 3D forest and how to optimize the scene to run well in the viewport.

Composition studies created for this project.