Wanderlust
Wanderlust was an exploration in enviroment storytelling for my Honours Project at Abertay University. I was fascinated by sketchfab environments because it felt like miniaturised game environments or with some examples 3D paintings. With this project i wanted to progress with my composition and style but create a story arch across the environments.
Wanderlust is all about a fathers drive to go and find his son. The father lives on the west coast of Canada with his son living on the east coast but they've not seen each other for a number of years now. This issue is the father is only making enough money to stay where he currently is so he's decided to sell all his assets and move into a bus to go and re-connect with his son again. This first concept is him going to find an appropriate bus to hold all his equipment and be reliable enough to cross the country on a slim budget.
At the start of the semester my goal was to create a full PBR interior enviroment for the bus with all the tools he would require. The father is a wood worker and this would help him afford to pave his way across the country on his small budget. This would have been great but it would mean almost all of my time would be spent on modelling every asset in the bus to look realistic, so i decided to dial it back and focus on environment storytelling with a more stylised feel instead.
For the first environment I based the block out from my concept to see how the environment would feel. This was a great idea because I quickly realized I had to scale down and focus on user interaction within Sketchfab.
Now I had a better understanding of the preferred scale I opted to do another concept of the garage showing all the tools/equipment need to get neglected buses back to being operational. Since this was a scrapyard I wanted all the assets to look messy, worn and cluttered. This is why there is loads of tools sprawled around the bus but since I was focusing on environmental storytelling I wanted to add extra elements across the garage for players to explore, for example on the roof there's a spot for the workers to relax. The bus is the focus point but I wanted to make this garage unique so when doing my initial research for scrapyards I found an amazing jig that would rotate an entire bus on its side for hard to reach maintenance.
Choosing the bus was an important decision because it had to be affordable to buy and keep running which is why I chose the Bluebird TC2000. It was used across Canada/America for many schools meaning there would be lots of available parts if needed. It was also one of the longest buses available and this was important since the bus would be split into a workshop and living area which would be sealed off from all the dust and contaminants. I used a Blueprint to scale the bus.
The next stage was to model the interior of the garage. Since I was creating multiple environments i used freely downloadable models from Sketchfab to save some time, all of which are referenced on my Sketchfab file and within my honors project. This was fantastic however a lot of the models have poor UV maps which all had to be re-done. I enjoyed creating the interior because although I had my concept for reference i had free reign to create a convening workshop with tools sprawled all over. I appreciate an environment that isn't too clean because assets out of place create a narrative for the viewer to piece together which in the end makes the viewer interact with the piece for longer.
Modeling the outside was equally as challenging as the interior since the composition had to make sense but also lead the viewer round the environment inside and out. To do this I used the large tree on the left and the container on the right to draw the viewers eye. I did dial back the scale from the initial block out but there still was a lot of space to fill so I used the bus as the scale reference. Some assets like the wooden pallets were great for adding clutter but i didn't want to over saturate it so tried to use a good variety of assets.
To reduce the loading time of the scene within Sketchfab I combined assets on the same UV sheet. This would also help speed up the texturing process.
If you want to see the full thought process and additional concepts download the project PDF.