3D Modeling & Animation
2025-26
2025-26
The title of my project is The Forgotten Classroom. The scene focuses on creating an abandoned and eerie atmosphere through the environment, lighting, and visuals. The overall goal is to make the setting feel empty and unsettling without directly explaining everything to the viewer.
The purpose of the cutscene is to introduce the setting and establish the tone of the project. It also hints at past events through environmental details and visual changes in the scene. Instead of fully explaining the story, it is meant to create curiosity and mystery.
The character is a simple biped robot shown from a first-person perspective. Using a robot instead of a human helps keep the environment feeling abandoned while still allowing interaction with objects in the scene. Most of the character’s expression comes from physical expressions and camera movements rather than dialogue.
The cutscene tells the story through lighting, camera movement, and environmental details instead of spoken dialogue. Changes in the environment and the way the camera focuses on certain objects help guide the viewer’s attention. This allows the scene to communicate mood and story visually rather than through conversation
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Don't believe your classmates unless you are 100% sure you have a backup save file.
Everything not mentioned below.
Filing Cabinet,
Projector,
Office Chair,
Portions of the Defunct character model.
For this section, I chose the prompt The Forgotten Classroom. The environment is centered around an abandoned classroom connected to a liminal hallway. According to the original idea, sunlight would enter through the windows while an old projector suddenly turned on and startled the protagonist, causing them to run into the hallway and become trapped in a seamless loop. Unfortunately, due to time constraints and issues with a character model, I was not able to fully implement that sequence. Even so, I designed the environment around that concept so the scene would still support the story.
Most of the assets in the scene were created by me. The only gathered assets were the filing cabinet, projector, and office chair. I chose to create most of the environment myself because it allowed me to customize the scene while also demonstrating my modeling skills. The gathered assets were used to save time and help fill out the classroom.
The modeling tool I used most often was Editable Poly. Nearly every original asset in the scene was created using it, including the lockers, classroom desks, hallway, classroom walls, laptop, monitor, lights, windows, and doors. The asset I am most proud of is the hallway. While it was not originally intended to be a liminal space, it gradually evolved into one during development. The repeating lockers, checkered floor, and long layout helped create the feeling of an endless corridor, which became one of the strongest visual elements of the scene.
To keep the project organized, I used groups and groups within groups to separate different parts of the environment. I also used many referenced copies of objects like lockers, lights, and desks. This allowed me to make changes to the original model and have those changes automatically appear on every copy. The asset list helped me keep track of what still needed to be created and what assets could be gathered online.
A large part of this section was working around time limitations. We were originally supposed to have around a month to complete it, but I only had about a week and a half. Because of that, I focused on building the environment first and left some of the more ambitious ideas, such as the character sequence and projector scare, for later. Even though those elements were never fully completed, the environment itself ended up becoming the focus of the scene, especially after the hallway evolved into a liminal space.
Overall, this section helped me improve my environment modeling skills and showed me how much planning goes into larger scenes. It also gave me more experience organizing complex projects and creating reusable assets. Looking ahead, I was most interested in the lighting stage because it would allow me to fully lean into the liminal atmosphere that started to develop during the modeling process.
In this project, I focused on using lighting to create a liminal atmosphere. The hallway was designed to feel like an infinite, unending corridor with very little detail, but just enough familiar elements such as lockers, doors, ceiling lights, and the checkered flooring to make it recognizable. The repeating floor pattern helps reinforce the sense of depth and makes the space feel both familiar and unsettling. The classroom scene uses dimmer lighting to create a quieter and more isolated mood, helping contrast the larger hallway environment.
I used multiple ceiling lights throughout the hallway and classroom to illuminate the scene. In the hallway, the lights are evenly spaced, creating a repeating pattern that resembles an optical illusion. This repetition draws the viewer's eye toward the end of the corridor and exaggerates the feeling that the hallway continues forever. I also used fog to make the lighting more visible, the strobe less noticeable, and add to the backrooms esque atmosphere.
One challenge I faced was the limited amount of time available to complete this section. I only had about a week and a half to finish it, compared to the month or so we were originally supposed to have. While some of the lighting work was done throughout development, most of the final lighting setup and adjustments were completed during the last day or two of the section. I also spent a significant amount of time trying to get the fog effect to work correctly and interact with the lighting the way I wanted. Small adjustments to the fog settings and light intensity often had a large impact on the final render, so finding the right balance required a lot of testing. Especially because I wanted the perspective to be able to still see all the way down the hallway and not just get their vision blocked.
Overall, the lighting helps enhance the scene by creating a liminal and immersive environment while guiding the viewer's attention through the space. The repeating lights, checkered flooring, and fog all work together to create the feeling of an endless hallway that is familiar enough to recognize but strange enough to feel unsettling.
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