Dream Space
A floating alien-laboratory island modelled in Blender — a place half-remembered from a dream, where bioluminescent crystals hum and mushroom pads bounce you between domes.
01 — Concept
What is the dream?
The brief asked for a "dream space". My recurring dream lately has been standing on a small island that floats in indigo void, surrounded by architecture that looks half-grown, half-built — domes covered in vines, pillars that glow from inside, a tiny spaceship parked on a quiet pad. Nothing threatening, no goals, just the urge to wander and touch things.
I distilled this down to three pillars before sketching:
- Quiet wonder, not adventure. No combat, no quest log. The space rewards looking.
- Touch reveals the world. Every meaningful object is designed to respond to the player — physics-first when ported to Unity.
- Ambiguous scale. Player & island both feel small inside a much bigger void.
"You wake on an island that was never really there."
02 — Mood & References
Mood board
Before drawing anything I pulled references from Studio Ghibli (architecture silhouettes), Subnautica (bioluminescence underwater), Moebius (alien horizons + flat colour), and Journey (minimalism & emotional pacing). I locked the palette: deep voids, mint domes, bio-glow green, amethyst crystal, a single warm gold accent for "lantern" beats.
ethereal alien-lab low-gravity bioluminescent crystalline twilight
03 — Layout Sketch
Top-down floor plan
I started with a paper-sketch top-down to figure out scale and player flow. Spawn is on the south-west tip; the player walks past mushroom pads, climbs to the crystal tower, drops into the central dome (hub), then crosses bridges out to the greenhouse and landing pad. Total walking time ≈ 90 s if you don't stop — but the design assumes you stop.
04 — Perspective Sketch
3/4 view block-in
Once the plan worked, I did a 3/4 perspective in Procreate to set the silhouette & lighting direction. The crystal tower is the only vertical accent on the left so it reads as a beacon; everything else sits low to keep the sky readable.
05 — Interactions
Six core interactions — planned for Unity port
The brief asks us to "make good use of built-in physics", so even though the deliverable for this milestone is a fully-textured Blender scene, I storyboarded the six interactions I'd wire up when bringing the assets into Unity: Rigidbody jump pads, HingeJoint bridges, proximity emissive triggers, look-at FOV blends, push-doors, and a wind-driven spore VFX. Each is intentionally simple — built-in components only.
06 — Process
Timeline + Blender block-out
Eight phases across four weeks. Week 2 was a pure block-out pass in Blender — primitive cubes, cylinders and a sculpted base mesh — so the silhouette and scale were locked before any detail or texturing happened. The outliner on the right shows the final scene tree.
07 — Final result
Renders from the build
Cycles renders / EEVEE turntable from the final Blender scene. The crystal tower glow uses an Emission shader driven by a Voronoi pattern; the underside cracks are stylized texture paint over a sculpted mesh.
08 — Reflection
What worked, what I'd change
- What worked: Locking the silhouette in week 2 with a pure block-out (no textures, no detail) — every later phase was decoration on a structure I already trusted.
- What I'd change: The crystal tower's emission is a little too uniform; in a Cycles re-bake I'd add slow noise to the intensity so it feels alive instead of lit.
- Next step: Export the Blender scene as glTF and bring it into Unity to wire up the six interactions storyboarded in §05 — that's where the dream actually becomes inhabitable.