GART 250 : Agent Fitz' Room Part 1: Gathering reference

This project is centred around creating a bedroom environment for my Original Character Agent A. Fitzgerald or "Agent Fitz". My favourite part of environment art is the story telling. I think its important that a scene contains a narrative which is why I like centring my scenes around a character.

So for this project its important to get the context of who Agent Fitz is. This character is part of a black ops team in which he's technically the field medic but often takes on a more combative role. He was also experimented on and became a bio weapon for the company , the character in universe has a lot of destructive capabilities as a person with pyrokinesis.

This organization is oppressive, shady, evil and basically owns their agents entire lives. Think Shinra from final fantasy 7.

Extract from characters bio:

"Agent Fitzgerald is a 26 year old Irish immigrant who was recruited by "Varium" ten years ago on the (blacked out ), born 31st of October 2010 in a small town to a single mother (name blacked out) who then immigrated to Houston USA. Once Agent Fitzgerald was recruited and under went classified experiments by Doctor Monroe, Agent Fitzgerald is now acting field medic for Varium's black ops unit Group Vespa"

Original character portrait from 2020 :

When starting this project I had a clear sense of who the character was and vaguely aware of the stylistics but because this genre was outside of my comfort zone , I previously had mostly worked with steampunk or grungy assets, so doing something quite sterile and sci-fi should provide a nice challenge.

I wanted my research and reference for this project to be through so I started looking into various focus areas. The mood boards will of course expanded on as the project continues so the ones below are not reflective of all my references for the project just the initial ones.

I created a general mood board of "sci fi" and "cyber punk" bedrooms gathering images mainly from Pinterest. this gave me a good idea on the general aesthetics and conventions of this style of environment. I really liked the aspects of having an enclosed bed and windows near the bed. It feels cinematic and adds to the sense of oppressiveness.

I also gathered reference for the personal clutter assets that I knew Fitz would have in his living space. This would be things like the medication he takes and often abuses, his cigarettes and novelty mugs (to show the characters sense of humour). As well as documents and files on his desk referencing his other teammates as Fitz is responsible for their on duty care and their general health whether he takes that role seriously or not is up for debate. I also wanted to add the combat boots as a stretch goal.

In addition I wanted the apartment to have a more realistic basis than just sci-fi productions so I decided that I'd also take inspiration from real life sources. Originally I was going to only look at real life micro apartments but I also looked into capture hotels in countries like Korea and japan.

I also took a lot of inspiration from the design and feel of student accommodation. In particular part of the initial layout was heavily inspired by my own room at Falmouth University's Glasney accommodation.

I also Looked a lot into concept art from Stars wars ,Star trek and red dwarf. I could pick out things I like in each of them I really enjoyed the corporate feel and brutalism present in a lot of early stars wars and the plasticly sterile almost bordering on cheap set design of star trek was uniquely inspiring when later on I was making the materials for the scene. Red dwarf probably influenced a lot of the humour that would be in the scene a bit silly and a bit tongue and cheek as well as there being a blend of everyday normal objects placed in high concepts sci-fi environments I thought it created a really nice contrast between the two and in my mind sense.

Something that always bugged me about sci-fi was the need to make everything sci-fi and futuristic and high concept when really when something works and works well humans rarely feel the need to change it, like storage boxes or paper clips or pill bottles there's very little need for the function and design of these objects to change so I don't imagine that in 20 years time or in my setting they would.

After this initial round of image gathering and research I used this website: https://floorplancreator.net/ to make a floor plan to use for reference . this website was helpful it gave me a sense of scale by being able to toggle between the floor plan and the 3d view that the website had. In addition it gave me some real life measurements to go off of.

Part 2: {https://emilykenny20.wixsite.com/myagamedev/post/gart-250-agent-fitz-room-part-2-initial-block-out-and-art-block }

(For References please look at the end of this blog series )