Hello, my name is Kenneth McMorran and I currently live in the city of Glasgow, UK. I am a freelance 3D Artist specialising primarily in environments. I’ve worked with 3D in some form or another for around 10 years, all the way back to my undergraduate years in interdisciplinary design. I spent my postgraduate years studying game art and animation and subsequently went on to work professionally for 4 years in the fantasy mobile MMO genre. Science fiction has always been my main inspiration and motivator and throughout the years I’ve tried to communicate that passion through my personal artwork. Recently, I had the privilege of working with an immersive theatre company called Punchdrunk on a project which would see me build the virtual representation of their latest, soon to be announced, production.

I began work on The Lab initially as a freelance project. Unfortunately the project didn’t make it out of pre-production, so instead of shelving the preliminary ground work, I considered it an opportunity to research and implement some techniques in Unity 5 that I thought were exciting and relevant but that I had not yet explored by myself. I knew that these techniques had the potential to strengthen and reinforce the narrative of an environment so I re-built the scene from the ground up with these 4 main areas of interest in mind:

Volumetric fog and lighting

Deferred decals

Face weighted normals

Animated lights

In terms of building the environment – specifically for an interior scene like The Lab – I think it’s quite important to think of the construction in terms of modularity. For me personally, this helps to break down what might seem like quite an overwhelming task at first.