Snake King's Throne Room

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Unlike some of the other 3-D projects I have in this portfolio, this one is all about level design, in this case an end boss level. For this project, everyone in my class was given the same model set, but no textures and no lighting. With only a week to finish our level, our job was to come up with a fully textured scene and a set limit to our light system for our hyper-theoretical final level. To add to the challenge, we were also given a character profile in order to match it to the design of the level. The character, the Snake King, is the dark over-lord of the local kingdom. He is most feared for his black magic and throwing anyone who opposed him into the fiery pit in the center of his throne room. With this character detail, I designed my throne room to keep the focus on the pit and the throne chairs, where the Snake King would be positioned most of the time.

For this project, I created three varying color schemes to create different game play moods: neutral, "Black Magic", "Alert" (or as I like to call it, "Red Alert"). For each of the moods, the lighting reflected certain elements that the player would feel during game play. For instance, the saturation of red in "Alert" instinctively warns the player that danger is approaching and to be on their guard. However, a cool lighting scheme, such as 'black magic' gives a sense of mystery as the character wanders around the room in the glow of magical light. This was one of my favorite projects to work on because it felt more like a task in a realistic job setting and to see what I can produce in a tight deaddline.

My favorite part of this project was working on the throne chairs. I had placed a lot of my time into creating a unique personality into the chairs through the texture set I made for them. The chairs look as if they indeed belonged to the Snake King with the red reptilian skinned cushions, dark wood, and embellished white marble detailing. One of the main key points I learned from this project was that playing around with different types of lights and color was a great way to dramatically change any setting without changing the models or textures themselves. There so many ways a single environment can be lit and each variation tells its own story without having to use figures in the scene.





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