The Schoolyard is where a lot of stuff happens in my film, and it’s also the most object-heavy of any of my locations. Also, it’s an exterior, which posed a whole other set of problems, such as making sure that you can’t see the edge of the ground-plane in any horizon shots while also making it not look like there’s absolutely nothing in the world around the Schoolyard area. Anyway, all I can say, really, is thank god for Trees!
So let me start from concept all the way to the so-far finalized status!
My work was cut out for me when my amazing and talented concept artist, Theo Aretos, did concept paintings for the Schoolyard environment:
This painting was done just to get the color scheme down, and at first I found it interesting considering how dry it felt, but then I realized that that’s actually a smart choice, since I want the schoolyard to feel like a sort of unwelcoming place. Also, this entire time I imagined the ground being covered in grass (because at the end of the day, I am a very very uncreative person when it comes to visual design…), so the idea of having it be a DIRT ground was simultaneously new to me, interesting, better than my original idea, AND it’ll make rendering easier (because fuck if I know how I was gonna render an entire field of grass!)
I then asked him to change up the design of the school-building and to also do a few more playstructure designs, as well as a topographical layout of the ground, and I then got these beauties:
And so my work began. First off, I started by modelling all the things I knew I needed: a picket fence, a stone wall, the school building, and whatever else I could think of in the way of playstructures to fill the area. Check them all out!
Picket Fence! (this was real easy to do, just a lotta copy and paste)
Brick Wall!
(To make the bricks seem authentic, I made a brick-randomizer thingimajigger that basically had clusters attached to 42 different points on a lattice surrounding a base brick shape, and over time those clusters all were programmed to jiggle around in 3D space. As a result, it made… a bit of a difference.)
Monkey Bars!
You can’t really see it from this angle, but this structure was meant to look extra terrifying because the bars go up and down very sharply over the length of the structure.
Sandbox!
Complete with sandcastle, shovel, and bucket. 🙂
Basketball Thingy!
I legitimately forget what it’s called.
You like the hoop, though? Yea, that was fun to make. 🙂
Play Structure Thingy!
This is actually the only play structure that will actually be USED in the story in an at-all important way (it’s what the Mean Girl Gang sits on as they watch the hero enter the monster mansion) and I ended up using the same model as what I’ve been using before since it looked good enough to begin with. I just wonked it up a bit to make it less perfectly straight and symmetrical, I got rid of the swing-set next to it, and later I plan on texturing it so that it looks like it’s actually made of wood and not perfect 3D cubes. (I also plan on texturing everything else in the play yard, but that goes without saying I guess)
Terrifying Slide!!
True story: my dad walked into my room at one point over break and saw me modelling this, and he said “You know, slides aren’t supposed to go up …” Anyway, my point in bringing that up is that the physical nature of these objects are not meant to serve their function, but rather serve the overall stylistic purpose of the play-yard, which is to be a sort of intimidating, terrifying place… but not in a super overt way. Really, though, this is the most overtly creepy thing in the entire schoolyard, I think.
Aaand of course, THE SCHOOL
With a little flag on top~
So yea! Once I modelled all these things, I then had to choose one more thing: TREES.
Luckily, Maya comes with a collection of built-in tree types that you can just paint into your scene, so I went through all of them and went with these Birches:
Cute, non? Also I looked up Birches and apparently they’re wide-spread all over the Northern Hemisphere in temperate climates, and it’s the national tree of like 3 different countries I think…. so I guess I did a good job of making my film be location-ambiguous!
Anyway, once that was all decided upon, it was time to painstakingly put all this shit together. Why painstakingly? Because this is a lot of memory for my computer to handle. But thank god for Layers in Maya, so I can turn on and off objects to make the program’s running speed faster! Woo.
And there ya go. Oh, and if you need further explanation of what will happen where in my film, here you go too:
Bam~
Oh and one last thing about the schoolyard — if you’re concerned that some of the play structure objects seem a bit low-res, then let me defend myself with two rationales behind the relatively short amount of time I spent on modelling everything (this entire thing was put together over the course of like 3 or 4 days):
1) A lot of this shit is going to be waaay in the background, with the exception of the play structure that the mean girl gang sits on
2) I don’t have much time left so I gotta cut corners somewhere…
So yea. Hope this was interesting to read! And as always, there is certainly more to come. 🙂
MmmaaaxxxRubinThesis 