Behind The Scenes: 3D App Experience

I really enjoy digital product design projects and use of 3D tools for 3d experience prototypes. From time to time, I challenge myself to create a demo of such application, like smart home app, or vehicle HMI. Keeps my skills in check and ready for client projects.

I always look at my list of themes and pick one that inspires me in the moment. Few years ago, I discovered a power of mindfulness and meditation and it really helped me throughout my career, so at some point, it found it's way onto the list. But before I did any actual work, I needed to come up with a concept.

There was a clear advantage of knowing a thing or two about meditation. If it were a client requirement without prior knowledge, I would need to hit the books and do my homework first. Mindfulness is a really broad area and there are multiple ways, how to apply it. You can go about meditation with a lot of different intents and goals, and there are small nuances and multiple techniques you can use.

For example, you would do a slightly different exercise to handle stress, than when you're simply trying to put your mind at ease and distance yourself from your thoughts.

Visit the full Pinboard here

So I came up with a selection screen idea, where you'd choose your initial intent and goal for a different guided meditation exercise. I picked three themes. Balance, calm and focus, where balance is more about handling difficulties, focus to prepare yourself for any kind of flow, and calm, which is more of a general basic meditation.

I created a Pinterest board and started searching for ideas, that would match these concepts. I really enjoyed looking at the various abstract 3D environments, so I saved a few. Focusing mostly on different ways, how to create a distinct mood. After a while, I have isolated several distinct elements, that I wanted to use. Nature, water and clouds.

I though about this a little bit and this "elements" idea felt pretty strong, so I tried to develop it a bit more on a very rough sketch. I tried to come up with three different isometric layouts, that would make use of these ideas. At this point, the quality and level of detail on the sketches was really not important. They served simply as a discovery ground for all of the researched ideas to come together.

The result of the rough sketch was a developed concept with multiple layers. Based on the mood and feeling I wanted to achieve, I assigned each "element" some more attributes, like color and materials.

Nature was all about, grass, plants and rocks and it's main color was green.

Water got a blue color and to convey calmness and purity, the materials were supposed to be mostly bright marble, desaturated wood and glass. 

Clouds were combined with orange color to support the focus theme with vibrant tone. Opposed to a calm concept, the materials were supposed to be a marble and stone materials with sheen and strong contrast and maybe some mineral or crystal elements.

I created a detailed sketches of these rough layouts, so I have better idea of what I'm actually going to create and went for a 3d modeling phase.

You can watch the process video on Youtube