Week 3: Garden and Cityscape VR

Week 3: This week for our class, we continued in our three groups. We were instructed to create using the VIVE VR Headset two projects, one was a garden and the other was a cityscape. It took a lot of work and time, but here are the results. What we had to keep in mind were the concepts of self, space, and place when constructing these pieces.

Craft: For our equipment for these projects, we utilized the following: Tilt Brush by Google, the Virtual Reality headset, VIVE w/ the VR controllers that came with VIVE, and the dedicated PC for VIVE. Other materials included sketchbooks and pencils to sketch out preliminary ideas of our projects, and a flash drive. All of these materials were used with the idea of space and dimension in mind while the process was ongoing. We also used the in-software programs to record clips and screen shots for later use.

For Composition, we went straight into the virtual reality. My group was tasked with creating a virtual world filled with buildings and a garden with plants. We first started with the garden world.  Using Tilt Brush, each one of us was given a plot of land to do with as we pleased. We had to have five 'real world' plants and then five imaginary plants. I say 'real world' because while they are not identical to the real thing, they resemble them close enough that anyone can guess what it is. Using only the first set of brushes in the program's selection, our designs were free and open for us to about and explore. And so that is what we did. It was difficult at first to get used to it but eventually, we got used to it. The workflow increased dramatically after doing it a few times. I designed the garden in a form of an oasis with large swaths of land lacking vegetation. Using the rule of thirds, I divided my plot of land into six squares. In each, I made sure there was some kind of plant to make the composition work. Using the drawing techniques we have honed during school and the notion of 3D space, I was able finish the piece. The same went with the cityscape. However, for this project, we were limited to a specific color for our palette. The challenge was creating  three to five buildings in a predominantly monochromatic fashion while keeping it interesting. The trick was to draw, even with a straight edge setting, the flat and even walls and floors of a building in a 3D space with limited control on mobility and scale. However, after a long process, it became increasingly easier to create more elaborate buildings such as the five story building.  Keeping space and the actual place in mind was a constant thing that needed to be addressed. But by working steadily and scaling down to walk through the space itself, visualizing it as the self, made it much easier to manage.

Concept: I wanted to create a garden that was simple, aesthetically pleasing, and easy to construct. Pragmatically, it was because I did not possess the patience to meticulously paint in every single blade of grass or shrub that I would have done had I did have the patience. As a result, I decided that an oasis would be the most appropriate setting since the focus would be the plants and not the surroundings as my classmates did. As a fan of desert and other minimalist environments in my works, I thought an oasis, an island of life in a sea of sand would be most appropriate given my own personal preferences. For the buildings, I created three buildings of different utilities such as an office building, house, and food stand. I did this because for our cityscape I wanted to have a diverse array of buildings to give life to the VR file it was set in. Since I was the first to create in the file, I wanted to form a foundation that the others would have an easier time filling up. I thought that creating a pizza joint, a house, and an office building for the diverse array of shapes and settings that would make an interesting composition. It was also done to contrast the similar color scheme of the monochromatic limitation placed on us. Each building has a minimalist approach when it came to the spacial interior. I wanted the focus to be of the space itself and not of the elements that comprised it. The place itself could be summed up from the buildings themselves with their obvious shapes and utilities implied. The same goes for the garden. The tree is the main focal point, and it being in the middle has the rest of the garden presented off it like a wheel, forcing the viewer to roam around the tree and thus seeing all that it has to offer.