Senior VSFX Project {Prequarter}

Initial concept development for VSFX-408 Winter 2021

A lone temple on an island floating among the clouds holds the secret to travelling between galaxies. I want to focus a lot on the lighting and texturing aspects of the composition to imply a narrative of the temple being devoted to a goddess of the stars who blessed her devout followers with the gift of a portal leading to other worlds scattered across the universe.

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SOFTWARE

Houdini for terrain/foliage generation and basic ruins geometry

Maya for basic temple geometry

ZBrush for the creation of insertmesh brushes of any carved details on the towers as well as sculpting the faces on the tower/any statues of deities

Substance Designer/Painter for texturing

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MOODBOARD

I want to convey the passage of time (from early afternoon to ≈5/6pm) through lighting, so while the overall tone should stay fairly bright/warm throughout the composition, there will be a transition from normal daylight to more of a golden hour/sunset type of light.

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REFERENCES

Island / Environment

The general idea is that there's a floating island that has somehow eroded/detached itself from surrounding cliff faces that humanity had figured out a way to inhabit/build on. And because floating islands don't actually exist in the real world, I'm going to use a couple concept art pieces just to portray what's going on in my head.

For the real world references of how I'm wanting to design/texture the island and its surrounding environment, I found really cool images of the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park in China. The park features massive vertical pillars of really cool rock formations and dense foliage that are simply a result of years of serious erosion. Also if they kind of look familiar, the national park was featured in the Avatar (2009) film (blue people not elemental benders) as the "Hallelujah Mountains" in Pandora.

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Temple

I've taken a lot of inspiration from a couple temples in Cambodia, specifically Bayon Temple and the Gates of Angkor Thom. Both of these structures feature gigantic face sculptures facing in the four cardinal directions adorning their towers. I plan to create the temple upside down to form the base of the island with the ruins/portal on top.

Bayon Temple

South Gate

The "Portal"

Instead of the generic glowy, swirly, interdimensional portal that we're used to seeing in the media, I want the portal to be initially read as a relief sculpture of a deity. When the shadow to the sundial is in it's specific position, the deity's mouth will open to reveal the portal or other world. The professor pointed me in the direction of the Bocca della Veritá in Italy that is thought to have been a drain cover featuring the face of the titan god Oceanus.

Instead of Oceanus, I'm planning to have this modeled in the likeness of the Egyptian goddess Nut (pronounced "Newt"), the goddess of the sky and mother of the cosmos.

Ruins

For the ruins on the top of the island, I want one of the main features to be a sundial surrounded by a circular formation of megaliths, like the Druid Temple in Yorkshire or the ever popular Stonehenge. The front of the island will be facing southeast so the sun sets directly behind the Sundial. The idea is that when sunlight hits the dial at a specific time in the evening, it will cast a shadow of a five-pointed star (a symbol of Nut) on the disk relief sculpture of Nut and reveal the portal to another galaxy.

Petroglyphs and Runes

Since Nut is the goddess of heavenly bodies, I want to incorporate astronomical symbols around the portal. On the podium of the sundial and scattered around the surrounding megaliths, will be glyphs of different constellations.

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PRE-VIS

Shots