Fantasy Library

Concept by Nathan Thorman (https://www.artstation.com/nate_thor)

This was a fun project to work on. It's much larger scale than previous projects and the ambitious-ness was exciting.

As much of it as possible was made modular (eg. arches, stairs, railing) and tiling textures were used for the floors, walls, and books. I think the grunge added later to the top floors really help break up the tiling. If I were to tweak this, I'd make the arches' bricks hold up better when viewed closely and ease up on the normal intensity. I think they may be catching too much shadow especially when viewed up close. This made it difficult to capture a nice close up image of the bookcases since they are wedged between the arches.

The sheer size of the environment made it difficult for my laptop, especially during the main layout stage. However, this helped me figure out and practice ways to optimise the scene (eg. stand-ins, tileable textures, efficient texture sizes etc.) I also found hiding or isolating objects helped navigate through the scene smoother.

Despite the difficulties, I really enjoyed working on this. I found the details charming (eg. railing, cogs, human-sized lamps) and I enjoyed looking up orreries to find a way to make the model look convincing. On top of that the lighting and magical element of it all was incredibly captivating to work with.