CONTEXT & RESEARCH
CONTEXT
This section consists of what my final idea is and why I want to do it, I will also include my pitch presentation here.
MY FINAL IDEA
An explanation for my fully final idea is, I want to make a 3D animated diorama of an interior bedroom visually styled to look like it's taking place in two fictional cities called Piltover and Zaun, which are from the League of Legends franchise. I basically want to make a visualisation of what I imagine a bedroom inside of these cities would look like, based on their style of architecture and furniture that I will be researching through official images and clips of the city. I can find these through the League of Legends website and YouTube which will have cut clips of the Netflix series called Arcane, which takes place in these two locations.
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Originally my final idea was only going to be a diorama of a room just in Piltover. I updated it to include Zaun as well because Cuban expressed an idea where I could make the diorama animated by flipping the Piltover scene to reveal the Zaun one underneath, and picturing the idea was really interesting to me, so I've decided that I'm going to engage with it. It will be more work, but I think it will be worth it.
PROPOSAL FORM
CONTEXT OF THE FRANCHISE
LEAGUE OF LEGENDS AND IT'S UNIVERSE
This section will be research about the League of Legends franchise specifically, going over how the locations included in my final project fit into the context of the game's lore, as well as the visuals and why I'm making my final project with a specific style within these cities.
WHAT IS LEAGUE OF LEGENDS?
League of Legends is a PC MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) video game released in 27th October 2009 and made by Riot Games.
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It's gameplay consists of multiple gamemodes, the main one being "Summoner's Rift", which is a mode where there are two teams of five placed on a symmetrically designed map, played from a birds-eye view. Each player has to assist their team to get to the enemies' side and destroy their "Nexus", which is basically the "heart" of the team. If you think of it as capture the flag, the Nexus is the flag.
The characters you play as all have their own unique abilities in fighting, and all of them have their own backstories about where they come from in the League universe and their origins. Most of them have relations to each other as well within the story.
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However, the gameplay doesn't have as much correlation to my final project compared to the lore, because my idea's focus is to take place in a specific location within the League universe, and this location has importance in the story due to certain events and characters originating from there.
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The name of the whole island where the League of Legends lore takes place is Runeterra. This island is where all the different factions are located.
The list of factions include:
- Piltover & Zaun
- Freljord
- Bilgewater
- Ionia
- Noxus
- Shurima
- Targon
- Ixtal
- Demacia
- Shadow Isles
- The Void
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Out of these, Piltover and Zaun are obviously the ones I'm researching.
Red team's Nexus
This is an image of the Summoner's Rift map, as described on the left, it's a symmetrically inverted map for two teams of five to fight for each side and destroy the enemy Nexus.
Bilgewater
This is one of the many places in Runeterra where there are certain events going on involving a specific range of characters from the game. Bilgewater doesn't really have a big connection to Piltover or Zaun, however. This is just an outside example of a location within the entirety of Runeterra.
WHAT IS PILTOVER & ZAUN?
Piltover is a luxurious steampunk-esque city set in Runeterra (the giant island that the League franchise takes place in).
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Zaun is also like a city but it's set right underneath Piltover, where the quality of life and appeal completely diminishes, atmosphere changes, and the air is even toxic.
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The relevance these cities have to the story mainly come from certain events that have occurred involving many of the playable League champions in the game, including Jinx, Vi, Jayce, Viktor, Caitlyn, Heimerdinger, Singed, and Warwick.
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In November 2021, a Netflix series called Arcane released, which is about exactly what I mentioned previously, it uncovers the events of Piltover and Zaun from the games' lore. This includes origins to the same champions I listed previously. The biggest focuses are Jinx and Vi.
ARCANE'S STORY FOR JINX AND VI
Within Arcane, the story starts with two sisters, Powder (later called Jinx) and Vi. They live in poor conditions inside of Zaun and were lucky enough to find a carer early in their lives named Vander, who works at a bar, and which has a downstairs area where he lets his children stay. He also found two boys to care for along with the two sisters, and they all essentially live as a family.
As the story progresses, the family are all separated due to a large amount of conflict between Vander and an old friend of his named Silco.
After this occurs, the two sisters are completely isolated from each other, and years later both of them attempt to find each other again, followed by an emotional ending.
PILTOVER & ZAUN VISUAL RESEARCH
PILTOVER
ZAUN
In just this collection of images, you can probably notice the distinct differences in atmosphere, including the theme of the architecture, the colours used, and the lighting.
Piltover appears very sunny and bright, with luxurious buildings, whilst Zaun has a sinister and gloomy feel, along with much dimmer lighting, with a green theme making it feel "toxic" as well.
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Adding these same variables into my dioramas will achieve the same effect and differences between the two cities, how one feels very rich and looks visually appealing, whilst the other has more run-down areas, dim lighting with unnatural or unusual colours, and with more trash laying around.
ZAUN IN ARCANE
I also wanted to show some images of Zaun from League's Netflix series "Arcane" because you can see it a lot clearer and understand the effects within its setting better upclose. I also feel that Arcane captures the atmosphere of Zaun a lot more effectively compared to the original images through the lighting and more areas that you can see.
As previously described, these images showoff the undercity with a very sinister and toxic setting, achieved by the effects of the dim pastel green lighting as well as the run-down and abandoned scene-building in these clips. The ancient texturing also helps sell the intended theme of the environment.
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This helps me with my diorama because I have more visual ideas on how to execute the "Zaun side" of my diorama correctly. Based from these images I can include a lot of dirt imperfections, scratches, and debris in my scene, along with dark lighting with the same shade of green or similar. I should also consider using similar material types, which would be concrete for the walls and ground. There are also some patterned objects and architecture with a style that looks similar to Piltover's, shown in the first image in the above collection. This means that Zaun's style when it comes to architecture and props isn't extremely far off to Piltover's, it's just revealed to appear broken, dusty, and ancient most of the time.
THE CONCEPT OF DUALITY
Duality is the idea of two completely opposite things in any circumstance. This can be simply good and evil for example, which is popular in a lot of movies and games.
Since I am going to be making a diorama of Piltover and it's undercity called Zaun on the other side of the diorama, I thought that duality would be a concept that would definitely fit into it. Mainly because Piltover is known to be a city with a good quality of life and is rich for the most part. It's also got a visual appeal and looks luxurious. However, its undercity known as Zaun is a direct opposite in almost every way. The quality of life is awful, the people living there are normally very poor, a lot of crime occurs and it looks very run-down as well. The air is also toxic down there, so anyone from Piltover most likely couldn't handle the living conditions of Zaun. The people who were born down there have simply adapted to the poor conditions of the undercity.
This basically makes Piltover & Zaun a perfect example of a Yin and Yang.
Piltover looks luxurious, and is the place of residence for wealthy people, and most lives are happy.
Zaun looks old, gloomy, and run-down, and poor people normally live there, and the quality of life is dreadful.
PILTOVER
These two images show Zaun and Piltover, here you can see what I mean when talking about duality, these two cities are visibly opposite to each other because one clearly lacks decent habitability, has a gloomy setting and is not the typical desired place to live in. Whilst the other is vibrant, has richer looking architecture and materials used, including gold. It's also clearly more habitable, and in fact definitely has a better quality of life for its residents.
ZAUN
This is something I can definitely execute effectively in my dioramas since I know what kind of colours I would need to be using, what type of style the architecture and props need to have, whether they need to look ancient or run-down or brand new and clean. All of this perfectly showcases a huge difference between two environments, which is exactly what I'm intending to do by following these images as reference for my dioramas.
COLOUR THEORY
The colour theory primarily goes over the concept of how certain colours work with each other in an art piece. They are a set of guidelines and rules that are intended to give you appealing visual results through colour schemes. This is normally because it is believed that using specific colour arrangements, you can achieve more appealing results since those are supposed to be what makes colours work well together. Designers typically pick the best colours by looking at the colour wheel and refer to the different schemes. The colour theory also can sometimes be connected to expressing emotions through the usage of specific colours or schemes.
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The image on the right shows six different colour arrangements with arrows indicating how they're supposed to go.
This means if you have a desired colour you want in your art, you can try one of these schemes following the same patterns as the arrows depending on which colour you've chosen. For example if I wanted to use purple with an analogous scheme, I would have to take the two other colours that are beside purple, which is blue and pink, and try to fit them into my artwork. This is one example of using the colour theory to achieve visually appealing results.
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This could assist me with my diorama project since I would like to make two different contrasting dioramas, however since they are meant to accurately represent two fictional cities, I would have to follow their colour schemes. However that doesn't completely cancel out the colour theory because the undercity "Zaun" has a green theme which is mainly supposed to emphasise the toxic air, making the environments seem less habitable and poorly maintained. And the luxurious city "Piltover" uses brighter colours of yellow tints, white in some areas and gold which contrasts to the grotesque characteristics of Zaun.
I'm also thinking that I could use these colour theory schemes for my background colours for each diorama depending on the theme of the environment. For example, the Zaun room would mainly be green, so a complementary colour for green is pink to red, so maybe I could make that the background. I do think I would make the colour appear a lot darker though, so that it's not too distracting from the scene.
DIORAMA CASE STUDIES
This section is dedicated to researching other dioramas on the internet and art platforms, just so I can look into some methods involving their presentation, how some may be organised, as well as the art and lighting styles some may include.
HOUSE EXAMPLE
This is an example of an outdoors diorama, showcasing a house with exterior details like plants and a tree, as well as a very small train adjacent to the house. I like this diorama a lot because it reveals a lot of visual detail within a very small space, it doesn't feel cluttered even if everything is close to one another. I also like the design choice of making the diorama "plate" a circular shape rather than the common cubic space.
I still think that my diorama would only really work in a cube shape because my scene is of an interior, which have right angled walls.
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I feel like the shape choice is very fitting for the presentation of this environment, I could imagine I wouldn't find it as appealing if it was a cubic space because the train is set on a circular rail which basically follows the flow of the circle. On the other hand, with a cubic version it would feel very off to have the same thing going on, even if the rails had 90 degree corners, it would feel jarring and unnatural since trains can't rotate like that.
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The art style is also extremely similar to Arcane, which also makes this a really helpful diorama to look at. The texturing is exactly like the Netflix series, it appears to be like watercoloured paint, whilst still attempting to have elements that make sense visually like the materials of the objects with the roughness, the normal mapping, and specular reflections.
This is the style I want to achieve for my diorama because I want it to look like it's set in Arcane, but I feel like it might be a huge struggle to get it to work, but time can only tell from when I'm doing my practical.
CLASSROOM
This is an indoor diorama, this time set in a cubic space, which I think makes more sense this time since indoor areas typically have right angled walls.
What I really like about this one is how some objects are scattered outside of the scene and how the edges of the diorama space are cracked and reveal the inner construction, just as if it was originally part of a full room, but got torn off of it.
It puts the scene inside of this void where if the objects fall out of the scene, they just float as if they were in space, which I think is an extremely creative design choice and makes the diorama feel less basic, and instead has an extra interesting element to it, making it more appealing to look at.
I would like to do something like this with my diorama, but I'm not fully sure what I would do, it could probably just be the same as this, showing inner construction and some props floating outside of it.
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I also really appreciate the lighting that went into this scene, the volumetrics look very clean and visible enough to be noticed but not in a distracting way. The usage of the beige-ish sunny coloured lighting also really sells the effect of the scene, showing that it could be taking place at noon or the afternoon, the typical active school hours, which relates us more to the scene and keeps us familiarized with what it's about.
The lighting looks similar to what is shown in the images of Piltover, so it's likely that I could use the same colour in my diorama. I also would really like to do the idea with the volumetric light casting through a window, since I think that typically looks very appealing.
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The intended art style seems to be almost photo-realism, but with some stylized choices including the volumetric lighting. It's also clear that the classroom style is supposed to be the ancient kinds with the vintage dark green chalkboards and wooden desks and chairs.
OUTDOORS NATURE SCENE
Another outdoors scene, this time being a natural environment with a tree, rocks, plants including what seems to be dandelions and some blue plants that I can't name, and a very small river with a bridging log.
The shape of this diorama is mostly circular, but with jagged edges, presumably for the sake of making it feel "natural" considering it's a nature scene, which makes it better compared to making it perfectly round.
What I really like about this one is the setting and atmosphere it has, mainly due to the vibrant sunny lighting and the ranging colours coming from the water, plants, rocks, and the wood.
I can also see a texturing style similar to Arcane in the rocks and wood, with sharper edges and an appearance similar to watercoloured paint like the house diorama, but this one has less colours banding between each other in its textures. Once again, this type of texturing is what I want to do for my dioramas, so seeing these is bit more helpful when it comes to what I can add to my models' textures to give them the same visual.
BEDROOM RESEARCH
Here I'm going to put up a few images of some bedrooms so that I can look into the type of objects and furniture you can find in these rooms, so that I know what I'm going to need to make in my scenes, but of course stylized to fit the city they're going inside of as well.
This is a large luxurious bedroom consisting of mostly white colours. What I love about this one is the large windows letting in a lot of sunlight as well as showing a nice view outside. I really like the modern but also vintage vibe the room gives off. There are objects including bedside cabinets with lamps on top, which is pretty common. There are also some single armed chairs lying around along with some mirrors. This does give me an idea that I could possibly add something like a chair or some objects on the walls too since those seem to be occupied occasionally.
This is a much older looking bedroom, but still has a lot of interesting furniture and objects laying around it. There are a plenty amount of paintings and portraits on the walls, which inspires me to add something similar in my scenes. There is also a minor storage area where they keep what looks like pots, which gives me an idea to add a shelf to my scene somewhere for a certain type of objects, like books, antiques, or any technology related to Piltover.
This image also has a similar style to Piltover, just a little more vintage, because of the patterns and shiny materials around some of the objects.
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This is another luxurious bedroom, but it's a bit more minimalistic compared to the other two. You can see around the bed there isn't too much furniture lying around. Most of the environment goes into the bed itself and next to it. There is a bedside shelf with lamps, and a curtain aside a giant window. What I like about this room is mainly just the luxurious feel to it, and there's also visible gold plating which really reminds me of Piltover as well.
TECHNICAL RESEARCH
My technical research will be more about techniques and methods within the practical. This may include helpful ways with making effective lighting, texturing, and even modelling so that I can determine how to make more complicated or detailed assets. Some of the things here will also be general tutorials about making something specific.
ADVANCED LIGHTING
This is a video I found not too long ago, which I found to be very useful since it lets you expand your limitations when lighting your scene. It allows you to go beyond just editing values like the strength, size, and shadow softness.
With the use of light nodes, you can do the same things you can do with material nodes, since the workflow is the same and they both contain mutual nodes. This means you can add textures to lights as if they were a projector, as well as adding multiple colours in the same light with gradients, noise, or literally any procedurally generated texture. This means you can also use textures as masks to make lights cast a specific shape, with this you can do many creative choices, one example is adding a light that looks like it's going through a set of blinds.
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Not only this, but you can also get more quirky with editing bounces in the lights, including how strong they are even without having to affect the original lights intensity. This is very useful if you want to take a step further with your lighting. One scenario may be when you may like the intensity of the original light, but you think the bounce lights it creates are too strong, so you want to make them weaker without having to make the original light weaker as well.
Whilst this does completely break the realism in the lighting, that doesn't necessarily mean it's an incorrect decision, it can still look visually appealing and even "realistic" to an extent if you don't give attention to unimportant details like how strong a bounce light physically can be.
Working with lighting like this is called stylized lighting. This could help in assisting my lighting since I would like to make it as appealing as possible for my scenes.
I found this to be extremely helpful because initially I wasn't too sure on how I would approach making a candle with details including melting and dripping wax, but finding this tutorial really gave me a perfect idea on how to make them. In here, rather than poly modelling the candle, he used different sculpting tools to draw the needed details, which I think is far more effective due to the fact that you're just using a brush, so it's like drawing but in 3D, which I think makes it a lot easier to make specific imperfect details like this. The wick is made simply with a bezier curve with thin geometry added to it. And the flame is done with a plane with a transparent texture of the flame itself, and then the plane was copied multiple times in different rotations so that the flame can appear "3D". I could definitely see myself using this in my dioramas for darker areas so they can emit light but not too much, I think it gives off a sinister horror vibe, so it's likely that I'll use this for my Zaun room.
CANDLES TUTORIAL
PROCEDURAL EDGE WEAR TUTORIAL
Since I believe that I would need to make edge wear on some materials, I thought this is an absolutely great tutorial because if it wasn't for it, then I would need to manually texture paint all of the edge wear on any objects, which is a much longer process than just doing this. This is far more beneficial since this workflow involves nodes procedurally identifying the pointy edges for you, meaning you can use that information to display a different material or different shade of colour to reveal edge wear, and you can also customize this by adding noise textures to influence the randomness of the edge wear, since it can never realistically be perfect. Another great benefit is, you can bake this information into a texture so that your computer doesn't need to keep processing the calculations once you're satisfied with the results, and you can just make it a part of your materials textures, making it easy to reimport if ever needed.
QUESTIONNAIRE (PRIMARY RESEARCH)
For some primary research, I decided to make a questionnaire to see what most people would like to see from my project, since it would be good to hear some feedback to see if I can make any further changes to my ideas or intentions.
In this question you can see I asked about what type of room people think would look best in the same style as Piltover, most people answered with a bedroom, which is also what I was thinking myself. I feel like a luxurious bedroom would be an interesting piece to see, considering bedrooms are where we relate to the most and consider them our "homes" within homes.
This question is about what season people would prefer to see my scenes in, most people said winter but spring and summer are very very close. Since spring and summer combined have a slightly higher score than winter, I think I'll be making my scenes take place within the summer. I also think this fits best with Piltover since vibrant lighting typically complements a luxurious environment, so it's definitely a good option. With Zaun it may not matter too much because that city is underground, so the lighting depends on the architecture and engineering done down there.
Similar to the season question, but this time I'm asking about the time of day. Dusk and dawn combined won by one point against people who voted mid-day. Since Zaun is going to be dark anyway, I can definitely consider that scene to be at dusk or dawn, but because mid-day has a lot of votes as well, I think I'll make Piltover take place at this time.
This is a very straightforward question, which was to either make the room appear messy or clean, and "messy" won by a lot more points. I can understand why because making the room appear messy means I can add more details and props, so it feels like it has more character and look less boring. I will make the Zaun room messy since it would make more sense considering the inhabitable and run-down conditions of the city, and I'll keep Piltover full of enough objects, but I won't make it fully clean or messy, since I don't want to stray far from the "perfect" and luxurious feel of the environment.
This is for the sake of my presentation of my product. Most people seemed to vote for ArtStation which I think makes sense and also YouTube. I'll definitely be uploading my project on ArtStation since that's a great platform for portfolio and generally a lot of artists post on there. YouTube I'll do as well but I think I'll post it unlisted and link it to my ArtStation.
FINAL QUESTIONNAIRE
I made this final questionnaire for my final product, the answers are the same between two people for the first three questions, which shows that they at least think that my final product definitely followed my intentions effectively. I only managed to get two people to do this questionnaire due to how late I made and sent it.
This is the final question, basically asking for any general feedback to my final product, both answers are something I can agree with because I also didn't like how the Piltover room appears "flat" as it's a texture when the Zaun one appears after rotating, but sadly I couldn't find a way to fix that since it would be physically impossible to make a room go inside another one like that.
"a spinny ball" refers to the occasional ball structure found around the images in Piltover, they appear fairly commonly. I somehow missed that and never got the idea to add one to my scene, but looking back at it now I do think it would have been a good addition.