Week 1: A Divine Lesson

I recently joined, on a volunteer basis, an animation team for a short film called A Divine Lesson in which a baby angel and demon and switched out at birth accidentally. The angel is sent to hell and raised there, while the demon is sent to heaven. The films main theme that it tackles is nature vs nurture, with a strong emphasis being made on nurture being the deciding factor.

Now that a synopsis of the project is out of the way we can focus on what I will be contributing to the project. My first task is to recreate a 2D design for God's Office in 3D Space. These were the concept works that were provided to me.

I determined my course of action should be this, create a basic layout of the room first, with some blockouts of where furniture should be added and then present this to the team for review. The review from the team would be key to making sure the basic layout of the room fits what they had in mind and to spot any size inconsistency between my layout and the concept work. Getting this accurate early on is important as when detail work starts to be done it will become harder to make adjustments. For scale reference they provided to me a model of the arch angel Michael.

My first step was to organize the concept art. Using the perspective cube I was able to align the camera to match more or less the perspective of the layout design while keeping the "front" facing forward in a straight line so any planes I extruded would be able to extrude straight and not be done at an angle. I wanted to avoid creating angled planes as a base as I foresaw that this could cause problems.

Now I went on to actually to model the room layout and block in some furniture to get a sense of scale.

The feedback I received was exactly what I was hoping for, they pointed out to me areas they felt needed to be extended and other areas where they felt the room should be smaller. In addition they told me their preference for windows to actually be physically modeled as a cut out of a wall rather than as an object placed on top of a wall.