Introduction:
In this week’s blog post, I’ll be going through my process when it came to modeling the Backrooms environment, beginning with how I went about modeling the exterior design, followed by the interior design. Afterward, I’ll be discussing the methods I used when modeling the geometry for the elevator and the ceiling lights. Lastly, I’ll be listing down the personal objectives I’ve set myself to complete by next week.
This Week’s Task:
For one of my environments, I chose to create the Backrooms as it was an area where I could utilise Liminal Space. To get an idea of what it looked like, and what to include in the environment, I watched many footages that took place within the Backrooms, as mentioned in my previous blog post.
Exterior Environment:
As always, I began with the exterior design of my environment as it’s the workflow that works best for me. This was extremely easy for me to do as the backrooms really consist of walls, a floor, and a ceiling, whereas the other environments I’ve worked on consisted of windows, doors, etc.
To create the wall, I used a Polygon Cube and rescaled it so it was the size I wanted. At the moment, the wall looked a bit too dull and boring to look at. Therefore, I chose to include edges on the top and bottom of the wall to make it less boring.
To create the edges, I used the Multi-Cut tool to insert edge loops, each with a gap of 10% from the top and bottom of the wall. Afterward, I selected the faces at the top and bottom and extruded them, making them bulge out from the rest of the wall.
Once I had a finished wall, I duplicated it several times to create the outline of the first room, leaving gaps to create hallway paths.
After I designed the outline for the first room and its hallways, I modeled the outline of the main centre room. This room consists of many gaps as it’ll connect to many other areas, as well as consist of an elevator.
I next modeled the side rooms. I didn’t need to put much effort into these rooms as they won’t necessarily play a big role in my animation; however, they will be seen within the background for a few scenes, meaning I had to model them to look as if there was no dead end within the main room.
Whereas the right side of the main room will play a part in the animation. It consists of hallways and another room.
Interior Environment:
My next job was to model the interior design of the Backrooms. I began by duplicating the walls and repositioning them so that the main room feels like a maze. I don’t want my character to be able to visualise the entire room as they enter the room, except for the middle area. This is because the narrative consists of the character feeling lost.
After I was done turning the main room into a maze, I decided to model pillars to place around the environment. I used the same method that I used for the walls and used the Multi-Cut tool to insert edge loops, extruding the top and bottom faces afterward to bulge the edges.
Once I finished modeling my pillar, I duplicated it many times and positioned them around the environment where there was open space.
I chose to model a few wall tops to position them by the entrance and exits of the hallways. To get them to fit well with the walls, all I did was get a wall object, and delete all faces, besides the upper edge. Once I modeled one, I just duplicated many copies and repositioned them.
Lastly, I created a Polygon Plane to use as the floor and scaled it so it covered the entire environment.
Elevator:
Next, I modeled the elevator, beginning with the walls.
I then modeled the entrance of the elevator, inserting edge loops and extruding faces to get the shape I wanted. As you can notice in the screenshots below, I made a thin gap within the side faces to create the space where the elevator doors will be sliding in and out.
To make the elevator look like an actual elevator, I had to include the feature you would typically see in an elevator in real life. These consisted of buttons, screens, and borders.
Furthermore, I also modeled curved poles as they’re typically seen in a standard elevator. To do this, I created a path using the Curve Tool, and then created a NURBS Circle and repositioned it next to the path. I then selected both of them and extruded them to create the pole’s geometry. To extrude, I went on:
Surfaces > Extrude
As you can see in the screenshot below, the geometry is inside out. To fix this, I reversed the geometry by going on:
Surfaces > Reverse Direction
As my pole’s geometry was fixed now, I duplicated it twice and repositioned each object.
Lastly, i created the elevator floor using a Polygon Plane.
Ceiling Lights:
Before creating the ceiling lights, I had to create the actual ceilings themselves. I did this by using Polygon Planes and adjusting the size with their vertecies.
To find the right size for the ceiling lights, I inserted equally spreaded edge loops on the ceilings and selected the faces that I wanted to convert into lights.
Once I had the faces selected, I extruded them and adjusted the depth of them.
At this point, my ceiling lights were still part of the ceiling. I ideally wanted them to be separated from each other so I had two individual objects. To fix this, I went into each individual light and selected all faces. Once I had them selected, I extracted them, allowing them to become their own object. To extract them, I went on:
Edit Mesh > Extract.
Lastly, as a personal preference, I chose to replace the ceilings with new Polygon Planes as I didn’t want too many unnecessary edge loops. To make sure I got the new Polygon Planes in the correct position, I selected the new and the old ceilings and went on:
Modify > Match Transformations > Match All Transforms
Objectives For Next Week:
- Texture Floor.
- Texture Ceiling.
- Texture Walls.
- Texture Pillars.