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itriedwix · 2 years

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Nostalgia/Places of the Mind

Dreaming about a memory and then remembering the dream in order to paint it as reality.

What is the concept and its twist:

The mind could be considered a maze, yet in the idea of ones mind, it is more organised and there must be creatures that keep it that way.

Having a love for films and games, an early Polish film was the interest for the project concept called Kingsize, made in 1988, right after the restoration and political independence movements, it depicts gnomes living in the world of Drawerland or "Shuflandya", where the most loyal and obedient of dwarfs grows in ranks and is allowed to visit the "larger world", our world. Yet, there is a resistance of gnomes, who have stolen access to the potion that allows the size change and now want other gnomes to choose how and where they live with the motto of "Kingsize for everybody".

Even as a child, there was always the idea that this strange environment and world existed in the mind, where the tiny people were the workers that organised the abstracts inside the head, shuffled around memories and erased those unwanted or unnecessary information. Following this childhood idea, the concept was born.

This projects reminds me of home and a childhood spent watching old Polish television but also its something that is so rooted in the imagination that it shares both themes. Thus it will be a 2 in 1 project.

Reference board: https://i.imgur.com/yWK5me8.jpg (Kingsize image)

Researching the concept further, the game "It Takes Two" peaked the interest, as it aligns with the idea of small creatures in a larger world. What was interesting was how the environments were constructed around the Lilliyput narratology, where everyday objects are larger for gameplay purposes.

Work in Progress:

Here is the blockout in Maya for the scene.

What postponed the progress was the question of "how to show a small world in reality without using characters in the scene?"

The decision was to assign the character/gnomes jobs, thus birthing the idea of the gnomes owning businesses like shops, bars or restaurants under the cabinets.

Unreal Engine offers a range of molecularity tools, one of them being Splines, which is mostly used to create roads and cables, but with the ladder and the file cabinet asset it is possible to manipulate the tool into generating a copy and setting them up into a scene to create a set of individual self-generated assets for ease of use later in the scene/environment.

Here are the result for the extended project:

Texturing:

Using Substance Painter, was a first experience, as not having used it previously to create texture for assets in the past but Photoshop. The UI was fairly simple due to having knowledge with Photoshop, the material generation and painting between the two softwares were highly similar, almost as if Photoshop was its predecessor Substance Paint would always point out the UI overview was in the Help taskbar and its documentation from Substance and also there are some great tutorials online but that was a more of an emergency option, the gaol was to learn the software with as little of outside help as possible and still gather the general idea for creating textures.

Here as some of the results, successes and outcomes from using Substance Painter:

Here are the final results for the scene in Unreal:

Character scale reference.

The whole point was to create assets that were larger then in real life, so that when maybe wanting to take the project further and make a small playable demo, characters would not have to be downsized. The only issue would be managing the texture sizes as most textures were exported to 2048x2048, some as 1024x1024 and the rest as 512x512, the only 4k textures were that of the cabinet, the issue would be that it would take a toll on the final file size of the demo, and cost per pixel woulld be high if it were a demo for a Nintendo Switch or last gen consoles, but even so, the textures can be scaled down with Unreal help.

The overall final scene, after using the unbound option with the Post-Processioning Volume. Small lighting tweaks were required and the shadows initially were too dark and had to be turned down so that the lights in the back of the walls could be seen along side with the assets in the furthest part of the scene. Otherwise I ran into no issue whilst finalizing the scene.

As it was in the movie it is in the scene, a Bar & Grill ladies and gentlemen, a place of social, casual and secretive meeting. Visiting and working for bars for many years now, memorizing their decor, helped to realize this part of the scene, as family pictures or pictures of known publicly people would hand on the walls of these pubs, the decision was made to insert and immortalized family photos with the permission of those in the photo of course. The photo frame being used a separating wall from the store next door.

Cheese, sausage and alcohol were the commodities of the working men in Poland during the communistic era of the history, my grandfather would always speak of those times, as he himself was a working class man and in the many Polish films done in that era, bring the attenuation of those items as the Polish standard, that even today every Polish household has in their fridges or cupboards.

Nothing could go to waste in the Polish 1970-80, a lot of member of the previous generation before my own was taught not to waste any kind or amount of food, and their next lesson was to always have foods that had a long lifespan for precautionary reasons. The moats popular items were those depicted in this part of the scene: Sardines in tomatos, Paprykash a fish based pate infused with paprika oil and combined with rice and Tour pate which could be made either from Chicken to Beef.

Bread is the lifeline of any house hold around the world, but during the Communist era in Poland, this novelty was only affordable to those in middle class and above, many people below those classes had have to line up for hours from as early as 4am everyday if be needed to receive even one loaf with the governments assistance.

The idea here was that the "gnomes" would "borrow" the bread or in this case buns, rip into an individual balls and reheat those balls in the toaster, then exchanged with the customer being you the player.

Here is where a custom emissive mask was implemented for the grills of the toaster where the ends have lower values from the middle to give them the effect of heat distribution.

Most assets were inserted into the scene manually and were place intentionally, but the Cookie Tin with all the seen Cookies and Sweets were manipulated by using physics, by placing a triangle shape into the tin and setting it with an translucent material to make it invisible, the assets were placed on the "ceiling" of the Tin and were told by Unreal to drop when pressing the play level button, and with many tries this was the final result that was used in the final render. This was the most fun I had with the project as it was required of me to use the Unreal character in order to actuality kick some of the assets back into place or into the back of the Tin.

A small history about why I chose to do this small part of the scene, this is meant to represent a stand where the "gnomes" could come and exchange something sweet and long lasting on their trip to the outside world. During the period in which the film (Szuflandja) was made, not many families has access to something as simple as sugar and commodities such as tea, coffee biscuits or sweets were expensive and only those with "special" access could obtain this, my mother once told me that her first sweet came in a form of a gift on Christmas Day and only then.

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