Stylised Shop Front

At the start of this week I moved onto the next project. For my second project of the year I picked the stylised environment brief in which I have to design, model and present a stylised shop front.

Of course there is a budget on the 3d side of this project.

I have a budget of 4 1024 x 1024 texture sheets and a tri budget of 15k.

For this project I didn't have lots of ideas straight off the bat so I did a load of research on Pinterest making some moodboards. For the first moodboard I collected images of many different stylised buildings for inspiration.

As at the start of this project it was nearing Halloween I wanted to explore that route as not only do I love Halloween but I think something seasonal would be quirky, unique and make for a great stylised hand painted piece of work. So I put together a little moodboard of some ideas.

I had another idea to make a candy building, the moodboard I created was very Hansel and Gretel inspired but I thought the colours would work really well in a stylised piece.

After creating moodboards to help with some of my ideas I did some sketches of a number of buildings off the top of my head.

I did like a few of these designs however I didn't know what shops these buildings would be, so I moved on to some of my more stronger ideas. I decided to follow on with my pumpkin/Halloween inspired shop.

I sketched out some ideas in my notepad one day as my traditional drawing skills are better than my digital and I can work quicker when formulating ideas. A lot of these designs are strong and I think the majority would work really well. However I decided to translate some into digital and iterate them a little.

These are some concepts I came up with, I wanted to keep quite organic shapes even though I don't have the biggest budget but that isn't a problem for me. A lot of these designs are very organic and naturally shaped. The feedback I recieved was good and the marked designs are the ones that stoof out the most.

Before deciding on a final idea I drew up some iterations on each of these designs.

After the inital designs I kind of decided to merge my two strongest ideas and design a Halloween candy shop.

I got some good feedback on the bottom left design as it looks like its alive. If I had more time on this project I would definitely have chosen that design but the process of animating and engine work would have been too lengthy for a 3 week project. I would like to return to this design in the future and actaully model it.

The top right design was also a strong contender although I didn't choose it in the end as I would also have to model the entire interior and I was worried I would not have the time to complete it to a polished standard, so I moved onto more designs.

This design appealed to the Halloween lover inside me as it kind of looks like a creepy haunted house but I felt as if the design wasn't pushed enough.

I had the best feeback on this design sheet. A lot of these iterations are strong however as this is a candy shop the top middle design got the best feeback. After deciding on the design I then went onto colour palette.

For this design I wanted it to be bright and colourful as that's what a lot of people associate with sweets. As I worked on the colour palette I also iterated the design a bit and added fairy lights, a striped door and colourful patterned paving stones.

The two marked colour palette choices recieved the best feedback however when making the final decision I think the pink colour palette is more effective.

After refining my inital idea into a more polished concept I focused on what would populate the level and how I could make this design more complex and interesting to the viewer.

So I sketched up some assets that would be appropriate:

After some asset designs I wanted to iterate the trees as they would need to fit into the style. I wanted to really push the cotton candy trees and here are some designs I came up with.

The ones I prefer are the ones that look more like cotton candy as I wanted to show that through design. Finally I picked the second and bottom left designs.

As I moved onto modelling the designs for the trees have changed a bit as I want to create a low poly hand painted shop front. Obviously I would not be able to make some perfectly rounded and fluffy on a low poly budget however I plan to make them blocky but paint them so they still come across as cotton candy.

I quickly made a blockout so I could create a polish concept (which I am still just finishing up). It was a fairly simple blockout but that's all I needed at this stage.

By the end of the first week I was onto modelling which was keeping to my plan, I may be a little behind so far I have kept pretty much to my timeplan.

Here is where I'm currently at in terms of modelling. I have kept everything fairly low poly which is the plan however I will iterate on these models over the next week as they are not finished yet. I have a few more assets to start modelling never the less the plan is to have everything completely modelled by midweek and get on with texturing at the end of the week.