Hilary Rhodes:
Designing a Virtual World
Set Building in the Round
Rhodes deliberately avoids using people in her landscapes because she wants to give viewers a sense of solo travel across both time and space. Instead, to convey mystical and philosophical ideas, she populates various scenes with enigmatic artifacts, such as a Victorian compass, crop circles, old postcards, a British passport, transparent cubes, maps and a trefoil knot to represent infinity.
Click the image to play QuickTime VR
Working back and forth between Bryce, Photoshop, Illustrator and several other applications, Rhodes painstakingly furnishes each scene with textures and virtual objects.
“It’s similar to set design,” she says, “except that you’re working in 3D, and you have to believe you’re in that space. You’re solving a lot of complex problems, like ‘Where am I going to put that tree so you can see it? Where will I put the knapsack?’”
The difference between a traditional stage and Rhodes’ virtual stage is that hers is in the round and everything has to look real. She can’t get away with false fronts. “It’s a funny hybrid,” she says. “As I work, I’m moving from one side of my brain to another. On one side, I visualize and document the landscapes; on the other, I chop and change as I solve technical challenges.”
Virtual Engineering
For some scenes, Rhodes builds pylons, plinths and even a dam to represent changes brought about by power and its mark upon the land. “I would have loved to build a whole power station for one of my landscapes,” Rhodes says. “Ansel Adams also had an obsession with power and pylons, and he photographed them around Hoover Dam.”
Starting in Illustrator, Rhodes draws vector profiles from sketches and photographs, then imports them into a 3D modeling program, Strata Studio. There she extrudes the elements, giving them depth, and assembles the pieces, “like making a little model on the computer.
“For one landscape, I imagined that I was a hydroelectric engineer deciding where to put a dam in the terrain. I worked on a dam in Thailand as a drafter, so I’ve got a fair idea of the type of terrain they need. I built the dam in Strata Studio and imported it into Bryce, though to fit it into the river valley, I had to do some virtual excavation.”
Going Cubic
Once Rhodes is satisfied with a landscape, she drops the files onto Apple’s MakeCubic application for QuickTime VR. To prepare the files for MakeCubic, Rhodes positions a virtual camera on the ground in each scene and takes digital photographs in six directions — north, south, east, west, up and down — each with a field view of 112.25°.
“As I work, I’m moving from one side of my brain to another. On one side, I visualize and document the landscapes; on the other, I chop and change as I solve technical challenges.”
“Then I take the files,” she says, “number them in the correct order, and tell Apple MakeCubic to make the scene a certain size, such as 600 by 600 dpi. Then I drop the file onto Make Cubic and it does its wonderful little job and transforms the files into a scene where you can look up, down and all round.”
After finishing the cubic panoramas, Rhodes imports them into VR Worx so she can provide entry points via hot spots and points on the virtual compass. She uses Squamish SoundSaVR to position ambient sounds associated with objects in the scene. Volume varies according to direction and scene rotation. Finally, Rhodes creates a shell for Exploration in Macromedia Director and adds a QuickTime movie of billboards satirically advertising the landscapes.
Ancient Concepts, New Media
Rhodes began her project in 1999 but, once her plan was complete, she needed only three months to create all of her panoramas. “Even though I explore and create new territories in the comfort of my studio,” Rhodes says, “I imagine journeying alongside travelers who set out to explore hidden ruins and unmarked areas on maps.
Click the image to play QuickTime VR
“For me,” Rhodes says, “the purpose of the journey was not arrival, but the constantly-changing landscape and my place in space. That’s why I chose the maze as the principal icon. It embodies ancient concepts of orientation and disorientation, puzzlement, confusion and resolution.”
