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Brandon O Sullivan

BA [Hons] 3D Design Modelmaking + Digital Art

Hello, my name is Brandon O'Sullivan I'm an aspiring artist specializing in modelmaking and conceptual design attempting to make a mark in the entertainment industry. My desire to design worlds, characters and assets with such detail, individuality and perfectionism are arduous hurdles I adamantly pursue to understand and overcome. The concepts I present can occasionally be vast and complicated. I decided to extrapolate a previous years project that showed high promise in both the entertainment and agriculture industry with an emphasis on architecture, education and environmental research which may become a reality in the future.

Here was some starting sketches on how my Aquaponics floor was to look like. In order to make it look like a maintenance heavy sector with a presentable public atmosphere for guests. I wanted a glossy public aquarium charm amongst a heavy industrial interior, public walkways, display monitors and metal observation platforms.

During my first sketches I had to resort to applying some realism into my building meaning I had to scale down my Garden to a more reasonable size. The size of the structure is about 250 Meters high and under 120 Meters in diameter. The Seattle Space Needle on the left was used for comparison.

This was the block out phase on what the conservatory was going to look like, I simply used a red cuboid as a human base to understand the dimensions and space required for a human to explore and interact with. The conservatory contained three floors including an open balcony for anyone to view from up high.

Here was another block out intended for the more detailed Aquaponics floor, I ensured to do some thorough research to understand how growing plants with fish was possible. This section only contained two floors with a supposed security floor to operate the important mechanical equipment in the tanks and the vegetation transports.

Speaking of Transports, I went out of my way to add a little more detail by designing some automated forklifts intended for many of the sectors including the Aquaponics Sector, the Forklift comes with three sensory cameras, an interactable front touch screen and omnidirectional steering system.

In order to show how the Aquaponics operate, the most vital component is most clearly the fish! Therefore I modeled, animated and rendered some swimming fish inside one of the tanks, my concern was how they can be exported to unity while maintaining their animation.

Here was combing all three floors together within the foundation of the garden, it was a lot of tweaking and removing of assets to realistically arrange each floor perfectly, although it was going well, I knew I had to add something outside to give off the perfect sense of scale.

I moved away from the top floors and focused on presenting the viewer with the opening entrance, taking inspiration from airports and shopping malls, I made the ground floor have a clean aesthetic with a historic display on how the garden was made and the floors incorporated in the building. There will also be a food court, an observational floor and an indoor water feature.

With the block outs prepped and cleaned, it was time to build and detail firstly with the Aquaponics tanks. This was also to be colored and textured with some gaps, scratches and decals, this was also to figure out how much I can add and how much to remove to make things easier.

Here I set about designing a courtyard with an eye-catching element in the center, an accessible honeycomb dome that doubles as a water feature, the windows were dimmed to be used a solar panels. I included some seating platforms, a crossing road and some night lights.

Here was the Conservatory minus the foliage and trees exported into the unity real time High Definition Render Pipeline engine, from it's original block out, the design remains the same, the detail however was significantly magnified. Only when the rest of the assets are added on top will this floor truly brighten up.

And here is a Render of the lower floor Aquaponics, I attempted to replicate my original sketch by placing the camera at the appropriate spot. There is still much more to do but I realized how much I have made to this garden without knowing it.

The Vertical Garden

I will be making a real time presentation rendering of a proof of concept Vertical Garden that is self sustainable, multifunctional and reduces both carbon footprint and consumption of available space along with appropriate size and dimensions mirrored closely to our world. The goal is to present this to a handful of architects and investors interested in possibly designing such a building in the future as discussions behind population and climate have become frequent. However a massive compromise needed to be taken in creating such a complicated structure, originally set to have twelve primary sectors with a collection of floors, The overall gardens interior had to be reduced to merely 3, Upon my decision, I went about designing the public conservatory, the Aquaponics Maintenance Floor and the opening entrance/foyer including an outside courtyard to give off a sense of scale to the average pedestrian.

Storytelling and Worldbuilding: It Takes Two

The thesis in particular was a fairly opinionated topic amongst the public, how I wrote the chapters had to be narrowed down to solid reason by it's references and quotes with unbiased facts. Storytelling and Worldbuilding has become a seamless blend of the two within the entertainment industry and there has seem to be a recent occurrence of movies and videogames favoring one instead of the other. My thesis was to enlighten aspiring readers to understand the advantages and flaws between the two topics, how they play key roles when adapting them into other mediums and how their longevity in maintaining interest in the fanbase means substituting one topic over another.

2021 2022 2023 2024

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