Angelina H.

Diomira -- The City like Dream

• Diomira, as the first city that the traveler in Invisible City encounters, portrayed a dreamy and almost perfect scene. At a September night, there was a woman who cried at the beautiful market. Diomira is the city that inspired me the first, and therefore my first thought is to create a fantasy market with small flags and women. Moriana also inspires me with the color palette, as its portrayed coral pallets feel similar to the dreamy environment in Diomira. From Moriana, I extracted pink, purple, and blue colors from corals to achieve an environment that almost feels like a fairy tale.

• In the scene, I used a combination of 3D models, 2D sprites, and VFX. The 3D model includes the house, flags, and tree trunk. The 2D sprites include leaves, grass, and the character. I also experiment with post-processing, including Vignette, color curves, color adjustment, and bloom. For the flags, I used a procedural rounded rectangle in the shader graph and achieved the triangle shape with the distorted model.

• I faced difficulty when I wanted to add bloom to 2D sprites. I could not add an emission map to them as I did for 3D shaders. Therefore, without bloom on the leaves and the character, they looked a bit dull than expected. Applying the normal map also was challenging, as I did not make the UV correctly, and the map would stretch and do not give the best result.

• Deciding on the color scheme also was challenging, as I initially planned to be a bright sunlight day to create more contrast with night. However, even though there is no purple-yellow sky in the real world, this color palette works well in this fantasy environment.