The Wilted Hour
4th Year, 2024, James Roha
Using Blender and Unreal Engine, the project is crafted to a cottage-core world that feels both enchantingly gentle and faintly unsettling. As part of the group that was given the topic of Cottage Core Dreamers, models, characters, and scenes were crafted and designed to blur the line between warmth and the unknown. A video was also destined to be created with the scenes, using digital tools to evoke a dream-like world that still felt slightly uncanny.
Cottage Core Dreamers was the topic of interest, meaning cottage core aesthetic was the center of the design. Understanding what the aesthetic holds and how it can shape the project. The initial research was to find images that represented the topic. Additional images from my own camera roll were also added for their aesthetic.
After the research, the students were asked to create characters in the form of kit-bashing. Kit-bashing is when you take a model and change what it is supposed to be. For example, the creature on the pages below, that is a form of kit-bashing. The head is uploaded to the model body, which was handmade. After the kit-bashing, students were instructed to make a video with sets of scenes made for the aesthetic. The following scenes are of a water tower, a cottage, and a forest scene with a slight eerie cottage core feel.
The creature in the images is a form of kit-bashing, where one has to combine different aspects of characters or objects to create something new. The images on the left are process photos, while the image on the right is the outcome of the creature in a forest scene.
