sherryn pattarawuttiwong

This scene is based off of the film Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan in collaboration with director of photography Wally Pfister. I first started with the reference image of the Café scene in Inception, lining up my camera to proxy objects placed in the scene. To make the scene dimensions and proportions a little more accurate, I used two camera angles of the same scene.

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Development

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Café Building

This main building can be separated into three pieces: the base, the awning, and the front entrance. The base building is a box with one beveled corner. The awning is created with a curve node snapped to the vertices of the base building. A duplicate of the awning curve is then transformed and skinned in order to create a surface. A semi-circle is swept across the same curve, resampled, and merged into the rest of the awning. The front entrance uses a series of booleans; first, the overall area of the entrance is subtracted from the main base. Within the entrance, the windows are subtracted as glass is merged in. The doors are created to be able to rotate open and close.

 

Café Assets

To populate the café, I have created chairs, tables, table cloth, signs, tea cups, and lights. The chairs are made with various curves polywired and resampled or subdivided to smooth. Some aspects, such as the back cushion and the back legs, use a bend node, while the seat cushion uses a taper node to make the back end widen out. The table uses a tube table top and polywired lines. The table cloth uses Houdini’s cloth sim, which imitates that of a heavier fabric in collision with the table. The sign textures were created in Adobe Illustrator. The two types of tea cups use a beveled tube while the other uses a revolved curve. The lights use a sphere and polywired curves.

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Background Environment

A procedurally-created building was created to fill the background environment. In order to give more variety to the background, boxes and a magazine stand are placed to imitate vendors. The magazines are placed on the stand by referencing the center point face of the stand, which can be created by using a facet with unique points and a primitive node with a scale of 0. This will allow the magazine to inherit the normal of the stand face. In order to create a more organic look, the boxes are beveled and “dented” with a mountain node. The sidewalk is created with two curves skinned and extruded, then edited to create the ramps onto the street.

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