Week 3: Labyrinth Details

This week we continued building our labyrinths:

Given the timeline and my beginner skills in Maya and I decided to keep the elements of changing time through scale but draw more heavily on the abstract references from Hilma af Kint (rather than trying to do a lot of detail in an urban landscape). A lot of her work focuses on dualities and especially the meeting of dualities. I am thinking I could incorporate this metaphor by having each wall be opposites of the other, so that you are walking between dualities or having the maze environment switch half way through so that you are crossing dualities.

I made a few mood boards to capture some of the shapes, colors and feelings I wanted to achieve:

Colors

Shapes

Space/Environment

I also sketched out some of these ideas in scene form to help visualize them.

I would like to achieve the following:

Design/Environment

1. Muted colors

   1. Purple

   2. Red

   3. Yellow

   4. Green

   5. Blue

   6. White

   7. Black

   8. Pink

   9. Orange

2. Intersecting ellipses

3. Organic shapes/colors

4. Organic Movement

With this in mind, I got to work translating this to my labyrinth.

Themes

1. Time represented by blooming (of “flowers”)/change

2. Duality represented by placement

Choose 3 shapes to start

1. Spirals

2. Intersecting ellipses

3. Organic fan

This looks terrible!

First, I experimented with taking shapes directly from some of Hilma af Kint’s paintings using Illustrator, extruding them in Maya and then importing them into Unreal. They looked fine in Maya but did not translate well to Unreal, so I abandoned this method.

Ok, this is working better

Instead, I tried putting together and manipulating primitive shapes in Maya and then importing them into Unreal and this worked. I made three shapes in Maya based off of Hilma af Kint’s paintings: a spiral, two intersecting circles, and three intersecting ellipses that looked like petals.

Then I imported these into Unreal and positioned them around my labyrinth to make up the walls. I then played around with changing the size of the shapes so that they transition from being very large to very small and vice versa. Overall, I think it looks to uniform and cluttered right now - I want it to look more free-form and abstract. I’m not sure that the “flower” shape fits, so I may take it out.

I decided to leave the design for the moment and experiment with materials to see if that would help me see a different perspective.

I followed the tutorial and use the preset “Moss” material as a base. I made some of the floating balls pink and the ground green. I loved making these materials and playing around with the texture and color - I’m excited to do more!