Entry 6: Modelling the cathedral

What I did the last few weeks (Feb 14, 2021- March 8, 2021)

For the last few weeks, I’ve been focused on getting started on the real cathedral: sussing out what my architectural “style” will be, along with getting started on the modelling of the place. I first determined what the size should be. Assuming that Unity’s units are around 1m to 1u, I took the measurements of the Cologne Cathedral in Germany (which was chosen simply for being a famous example of Gothic architecture, and one that I’ve seen in person and was personally shocked by the scale of) and applied it to the floor plane and walls. Then, I took the pews from a previous cathedral I built and imported them in to the save the time that would be taken making all new ones, and then proceeded to get started on the pillars that will line the sides of the building. I decided to approach them from an angle of clashing organic and geometric forms, using the Blob brush in Blender’s sculpting tools to make the pillars reminiscent of candle wax that has melted, dripped, and re-solidified. This, of course, requires you to subdivide the mesh a lot, and so a re-topology is required to reduce the mesh back down, and then bake the details that were lost into a displacement or normal map. This process allows very high resolution, complicated meshes to translate easily into game engines. The first pillar took a really long time to make, but after that I simplified my designs and it took much less time. Then I started filling in walls and creating windows. This used a similar process, but instead of a round pillar I was making flat walls. Usually I would take screenshots of designs from real Gothic churches and apply them to my model’s sculpted detail, with edits made when necessary to ensure the design fits where it needs to be. This can be seen with the reference photos included in the slideshow above and the resulting model in the next image. I also had this idea to create these geometric arms that reach over the top and sort of close in this massive space, make it feel more looming.

Reflections on the Week

I expected the modelling process to be the longest part of the project, and sure enough, it is. A lot of it has been trial and error and figuring out the most streamlined way of doing things. The first pillar, for example, took forever to do the re-topology on, but subsequent pillars learned their lesson and were much simpler both in the sculpted detail and in the complexity of the retopology. On top of that, I struggled with some of the walls, particularly the windows. This was because I was not paying attention to the face orientation on the object, and some of the faces were in one direction, and some in the other, meaning that the normal would not bake properly and the object would reflect light extremely weirdly. This is when I learned that Blender has a great built in tool that shows in red and blue what orientation faces are in, and I used that extensively afterwards to make sure the normals were in the right direction. In one of the in progress critiques, I got the great idea to have the cathedral progress from back to front as it gets more overtaken by these metal geometric forms, which also saved a bunch of time making some of the pillars much simpler. Overall, the biggest concern is just how long it is going to take to do everything. It is enjoyable work, but it is simply a lot of it, and it is all encompassing, in that there is not much else that can be done while waiting or anything.

This week’s Inspirations

This week, I researched some VR artists and discovered this article which a couple of immersive art experiences that have been explored in VR. Additionally, I discovered a website called Vive Arts which highlights quite a few VR art experiences as well, made for the HTC Vive platform. Below I will evaluate, briefly, some of the experiences I could explore.

• The Acute Art App

  • Acute Art is a group that collaborates with other artists to bring their works into VR, working with some big names like Olafur Eliasson (who I did a biography on a few posts ago) and Ai Weiwei. Unfortunately their app just is not very good, and the art experiences suffer greatly because of this. It seems like Acute Art is interested in making 360 videos and then streaming them to the app, which makes them look awful. Furthermore, most of the works are either better in person (such as Eliasson’s Rainbow) or pretentious garbage (Jakob Steenson’s Aquaphobia). The animation and 3D work is really nice in a lot of these works, but the video quality is so needlessly poor that it detracts greatly from the experience. The lack of interactivity also makes the immersion far less, feeling more like a spectator than a participant.

• Marina Abramovic - Rising

  • The best offering from Acute Art is Rising from famous Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic. This video features you in a theater watching her digital self drown in rising water in a box, while a monologue plays about her ideas surrounding VR and its capacity for empathy (which are important ideas I think she should keep to herself since explaining artworks takes all of the immersion and impact away), as well as facts about climate change. This one, though, did have the most impact as watching her drown and having nothing you can do about it is something that has a lot of emotional potential.

• She’s Already Gone - Yu Hong

  • Hong’s work, which unfortunately does not have a steam page, so I can only look at videos and images and glean what it is like, shows a lot of promise for the Danish VR development company Khora Contemporary which collaborated with her to make this work happen. The style features a unique colorful painterly aesthetic taken from Hong’s work, but enhanced through the lighting abilities of a game engine. It’s hard to tell how immersive or interactive it is, but it clearly shows the potential for adapting one’s artistic style into VR

Artist Profile : Ian Bogost

Ian Bogost is a game designer and academic whose work take a playful and meaningful approach to issues in society. He co-founded Persuasive Games in 2003 which is a studio that focuses on commission or original games for political campaigns, activist movements, and education. He also has written a few books about the implementation of politics into games and critical game design, such as How to Talk About Games which focuses on the intersection of art and product that games largely exist in. The work of his I would want to highlight is Simony (pictured above). This work features a tall pedestal adorned with medieval styled banners, which leads up to an interface that plays a game which parodies micro-transactions (small in-game purchases with real money) and the philosophy of games as a continuing service. The player must balance their reputation in the kingdom or use their money to climb the social latter by buying favors. The game has a joking element to it, making it enjoyable to play, as it is clearly poking fun at the games industry in a not-too-subtle but also not too confrontational way.