Meet the Artist
Will
MacRae
aka. Zorp, DPXA (Digital Painting and Expanded Animation)
“The Temple of the Dreamer (TTOTD) is a narrative VR pilgrimage set in a colourful fantasy world designed to evoke a dream-like sensation and a feeling of divinity. This prototype (and a completed sample of TTODD) consists of a game level, character models and assets designed using Blender and Unreal Engine playable on the Oculus Quest 2. TTOTD's main themes are dreams, magic, mystery, divinity, and the intersection between collective and individual imagination. Players traverse the Great Dreamer’s temple, the shrines of four primeval deities to gain their blessings, and then return Luap to sleep to save this world from annihilation. Luap dreams this world into existence. TTOTD uses its setting to explore how dreams act as a bridge between our imaginations, the waking world, and a near-death state. By harnessing the immersive capabilities of VR, TTOTD is designed to induce a feeling of magical dreaminess and explore mental states and moods that can be VR-elicited. The project has been heavily inspired by an array of world mythology. By embodying mythologically visual, tonal, and thematic qualities in TTOTD ‘s environment and character design, enhanced to a greater feeling of realism through VR, TTOTD attempts to activate the sacred in us. Stylistically TTOTD is a merging of a young boy’s imagination with a focus on colour and wonder, designs from a wide range of mythology, and a concealed, sinister sense of danger and the bizarre. This prototype includes a sample level and four of the deity’s 3D modelled and showcased. ”