Haunted House Project - Research and References

    For my very first project this year, out of all briefs I decided to choose to do the Haunted House 3D environment because the thematic attracted me the most. I've always loved spooky things.

    I began by doing my research. From the get go, I knew that my biggest inspiration for my project is going to be the Dimitrescu mansion from the early levels in Resident Evil Village – I had recently finished playing the game and I enjoyed it so much, I was very excited to do something inspired by it. I liked the idea of having an old school, haunted Victorian gothic mansion, despite the settings being quite modern. Below, I'm going to insert some of the images that I gathered from Resident Evil Village in order to use as reference for my environment.

  

    In Resident Evil Village, we play as Ethan Winters and there is this one room in particular that we discover early on, as soon as our character enters the mansion. It caught my attention the moment I saw it because it felt so interactive to me, like I could picture exactly what type of people are inhabiting it. 

    I couldn't play the game myself again, so in order to give you a better understanding of what type of a room I'm talking about, I watched this gameplay by AFGuidesHD – Resident Evil Village - Castle Dimitrescu Segment Full Gameplay Walkthrough (PS5 Gameplay 4k UHD) - YouTube, and took some screenshots to show you. 

   

    I did have other inspirations too, such as the mansion in The Haunting, which was a movie suggested to me by one of my tutors regarding my research. I watched it and I really enjoyed it, once again I really liked how interactive everything inside the mansion in the movie was, how I could instantly picture what type of people are inhabiting it.

The Haunting (1999)

    We usually tend to associate haunted places with visuals of abandoned asylums, old and uninhabited houses and very ruined environments, but I wanted to do something a little different and populate my environment instead, make it appear as if someone or rather something is still living there, despite the player not being able to see who or what it is.

   Sizing

    Something that I found quite creepy in Resident Evil Village was the height difference between the character that I was playing as and some of the enemies that were chasing me, who were actually the very inhabitants of the mansion. That is an element that I want to incorporate in my own scene as well because I find it very effective in terms of being unsettling – I want to make an environment that's inhabited by both humans and humanoid giant creatures, who are much taller and much bigger in comparison. In order to make that very clear in my scene, I'm going to model furniture that's sized differently because some of it is going to be fit for humans and the rest of it is going to be fit for these humanoid giant creatures.