Creating a Contemporary Themed Kit bash Kit

When creating a kit bash kit, there is often an emphasize on deciding what exactly it is for. Of course a question like this would be obvious, but the nuance of the question will have profound effect on how you will go about building this reusable toolbox. If for instance the kit is being create a play space for a game, the constraints imposed will be vastly different from if you just wanted to throw something together for a composition piece. Considerations for designing such a kit would include accounting for optimization, determining how it the kit would interact with the environment, how easy it is to integrate with other models already there. If you are making an architectural kit bash kit, do you have interiors in mind or do you just need to quickly create building that look good enough on the outside?

For my particular use case I want to achieve something that would allow me to easily create a contemporary environment that would be suitable for a good composition. This would put more of an emphasis on shape design and uniqueness. Contemporary styles tend to vary greatly which allows for plenty of room to experiment and decide how the style will be implemented. Before the actual construction of the kit bash kit can begin it is important to get a direction with how the architecture would actually look. For my case I decided to do an illustration that would give a some inspiration shown in the image above. The details were largely ignored in favor of the shape language and developing the overall tone of the environment. This provided a good direction for the warm and inviting environment that I want to create with this kit bash kit. Actually implementing it is going to be a challenge of its own, but the overall tone had been established.

When I did the initial illustration I didn’t quite factor how these walls were actually built. My only concern at the time was to create something that was warm and inviting so something else was needed to bridge that gap. Doing architectural research I have found that ceramic cladding would be used to for the facades of the buildings. As shown in the images below, ceramic cladding provides plenty of room to be creative with the architecture. This would serve as a way to anchor my designs to reality so the suspension of disbelief is possible but it will come with additional design constraints to consider.

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To emulate this lovely cladding I began working on the blender material that would be used for anything ceramic related. Ceramic cladding with porcelain can reflect light so an image can form, but not enough to the point it has good clarity. An example of ceramic porcelain being created in blender is shown below with the red wall.

It is important to try to design around units especially when constructing ready made prefabs. This would involve designing prefabs around a grid based system that is shown in the image below. In the example I have designed an early version of railing prefabs around a 4×4 cube that can easily be taken apart and put back together like Lego pieces.

Expanding upon this initial railing design, a stair case prefab was designed with 4×4 dimensions I mind shown in the example below.

As an experiment I wanted to incorporate more wooden architecture wooden bridge to contrast the ceramic material that is frequently used in contemporary styles. A Japanese style bridge was used as inspiration for the one modeled in the image below, with block in other props around it to provide a more interesting composition. It is intended to be a more artistic statement that shows the viewer that aesthetics is more emphasized than it would normally be.

Cobbling together an early block out with just the red ceramic from the initial illustration we can already see some potential with this style of architecture.

Truly the work right now is rough around the edges, but through the ugly side we get to learn some interesting ideas that we never considered at the time. Will share more as time progresses.