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COMSM0124 Virtual Environment Design PROJECT 2025

“The 2025 design challenge is to create a moment in time. Use Autodesk Maya and Arnold to model and render a new imaginary environment – that we can experience in VR.”

For your individual VE DESIGN project you need to imagine, design and build a virtual set. Your fictional scene must be a closed interior space, not an open-world exterior landscape. The model that you build will be rendered using Arnold in Autodesk Maya. Create a moment in time for us. Build an imaginary environment that we can experience in VR as a static 360° spherical projection.

Create a new fictional space, not a digital twin of a real location. The concept and theme of your environment is yours to design. It is not compulsory to do so, but – in the design phase of your project, you are allowed to experiment with AI to create visual references. You can use prompts in ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or any other free online image generator to develop your ideas, and to generate 2D concept artwork. You can then use these to develop style-sheets to reference as you build, or to engineer plans and drawings to use as model reference.

Think about environmental storytelling. To create immersion, a story about the environment needs to be told graphically, with visual cues. Does the space have a function and a history? Is your new space built in the style of or inspired by a culture, an architect, an artist, a film director, an author or an historical figure? In what time period does your imaginary world exist? Is it historic, modern or futuristic?

Once your artistic design is complete, it is then all about the computer graphics production pipeline. For your assessment, it is compulsory to use Autodesk Maya. The intended learning outcomes for the unit state that on completion of this VE DESIGN project, a successful student will be able to:

– Use complex polygonal geometry to model virtual environments

– Define UV space for 3D assets

– Design and create virtual environment lighting (natural and artificial)

– Build PBR shaders and design surface effects for visualisation

– Document the creative design process

In the School of Computer Science, different projects units have different submission points. For COMSM0124 the Blackboard submission point is Tuesday, the 16th December 2025, at 13:00. Please think carefully about your time management at this point in the term. Aim to submit well in advance of this deadline to avoid the risk of any late penalty. Extensions to this deadline can only be requested by using the University extenuating circumstances process, not by an emergency email to your Unit Director.

If you have any questions or need any support or advice please contact the Unit Director: [email protected], or the teaching assistants: Nate Thorne [email protected] or James O’Sullivan [email protected].

For your Blackboard submission you need to submit just two files: your 360° Arnold Render as a JPG file, and your design report as a PDF file. You do not need to submit your Maya project on Blackboard, but – in the assessment period – your Maya Binary scene file, your texture source files and any scripts must be available to send if requested.

Restrictions

In the design phase of your project, the use of AI is allowed for concept art, and design inspiration only. When creating Shaders for your model, you are also allowed to experiment with AI to build 2D PBR texture files.

“You are not allowed to use AI to create any geometry. Once you have design references, all of your model must then be built by you in Autodesk Maya.”

You are also not allowed to create your scene in Blender, Cinema4D, 3DS Max or any other DCC software or games engine. Do not attempt to submit any model built by anyone else. Do not download and then assemble found geometry. Do not use any marketplace. No credit card or free downloads. Do not attempt to reverse engineer objects. If you do it is plagiarism. You learn nothing – and most importantly it is dull.

Submission guidelines

All submissions will be through Blackboard. In December you will need to submit your Arnold Render and a technical PDF report that introduces your virtual environment and outlines the design process that you used to produce it. For this technical report there is no strict page limit – as a guide we would expect the body to be about ten pages maximum. The type-style and format of the report is yours to design. There is no strict template for the report. If you need extra space to show style sheets, reference images, sketches and pictures of model progression, please use an appendix as a gallery. Your 360° Arnold render should have a minimum resolution of 2560 pixels wide and 1280 pixels high. The nature of spherical equirectangular projections is that they are exactly twice as wide as they are high. This format requires a complete closed 360° environment. In the Arnold render the viewpoint is fixed and the scene static. Your environment design will be experienced by us, as a moment suspended in time. The location of the virtual camera in your scene will be important. In a 360° photograph this is the user’s fixed position – but they can spin around to explore the space. Avoid excessive detail at the zenith and nadir of the sphere. The camera location is the full 360° eyeline.

At the point of submission you will own the assets that you have built, and the design of a bespoke virtual environment. You will have built the geometry, textured and lit your scene and produced a 360° view of your environment. Your report just needs to take us on that journey, and explain the how and why, for each part of the design process.

It is also a reflective report. Since you will not be there when we – or our external examiner – views your submission, it is the report that explains where all of your time and effort has been spent.

“Consider your report a complete making-of document which explains the entire design process from creative idea through to final shot production.”

Please populate your report with interim screenshots to illustrate the text. Hopefully they will not be visible in your rendered shot, but do show us the polygon wireframes in your report.

Explain your model development process, and why different construction methods were used for different components of the scene. One method may lead to a more realistic result than another, or may lead to the same result but provide more flexibility during construction – or it may simply take less time. You may have thought forward about edge flow and surface design for texturing? If you have experimented with different ways to create the same shape and found one approach to be better than another - why? What does better mean? Reference clearly any external tutorials that you followed, or any sites that you used to download textures and files. Be sure to mention the parts of the design that you found most difficult, and the parts that you are most proud of. Feel free to take artistic licence with the lighting and rendering, but remember that we are primarily looking for a semi-realist 3D style and not a flat 2D cartoon look.

Please do not toon shade or use any non-photorealistic, painterly or other abstract or highly stylised technique – think Pixar and not the Simpsons.

Although there are creative aspects to this project, your submission should evidence that you can engineer real-world objects. The ability to study and visually breakdown a complex environment and real objects into component parts allows you to make decisions about the tools and procedures that you use. Being able to model from reference is a vital skill for a 3D artist. Did you make use of image planes to import drawings and photographs to model off of? As you created your scene did you experiment with different ways to build your geometry? Simply producing lots of geometry using only one rehearsed procedure repeatedly, or by mass duplication is time-consuming and can be limiting. A common level of detail and resolution, clean geome-try, and complexity of design, are all important factors.

We will explain the importance of building with clean quadrilateral geometry that has edge loops and flows lines to select. Did you model asymmetry and damage to add realism? Avoid non-manifold models and self-intersection. For many of your objects you will have been able to colour and texture them using a Standard Surface Shader model. Some of your objects may require you to project or place external textures or photographs. No object should remain in the default diffuse Lambert-grey state.

Experiment with texture projection and the design of UV space. Avoid stretched or distorted patterns, and pay close attention to the relative size of your textures. A common mistake is to apply texture information at the wrong scale. Show us the UV shell layouts and Hypergraph node networks.

To complete your report – personally evaluate your submission. How could it be improved with more time? The important question is ...

“What would you do differently if you did it again?”