Forget Me Not: Seeing Room of Person with Alzheimer's Through Their Eyes in 3D

Introduction 

Hiya! My name is Jeremy Wong. I have just graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with honours in Computer Arts at Abertay University, and am looking to pursue a masters in tech arts and foliage creation to further improve my skills and technical ability. 

I'm passionate about creating stylised environments that explore the human condition and the simplicity of the everyday. I've always been interested in environmental storytelling and visuals in games. I dabbled a bit in 3D in college at NESCOL, but really got introduced to it at the end of the second year of Abertay University, where I learned the basics of the 3D pipeline for games before specialising in environment work. I continued to develop my skills and love for the field into my honours project there. 

Throughout the later years of Abertay University I had the opportunity to do a couple of self lead projects plus group work, which culminated into joining a team for Abertay’s DARE Academy as an environment artist for a shipped game called Braise Satan! 

給我至愛的嫲嫲 – Forget Me Not

給我至愛的嫲嫲 – Forget Me Not, which roughly translates into "To My Beloved Mama", is my honours project, which is a homage to the cherished time spent with my grandma, who lives with Alzheimer's. Before my honours year, I paid her a visit in summer, sitting beside her and conversing with her, as she doesn't remember a lot of her family members, let alone me. Despite how she was physically there in front of me, that charm, character, and cheekiness weren't there anymore, making me realise the true weight of the situation. 

As an artist, this made me want to explore the recreation of her flat and the room she resides in, to highlight her perception of the world, my experience with her and that sombre reality that comes with living with Alzheimer's, but also to celebrate the life she once had. 

Alzheimer's plays a huge role in this project, as it heavily influences the technical, design, and artistic choices behind the environment. I want to showcase the strength of my technical foundations as much as I can, displaying the strong and founded rationale behind each decision.

The research that dictates my work ranges from something as simple as incorporating the water in the room (which comes from the etymology of forget-me-nots) to something broader, such as art therapy. Those who live with Alzheimer's benefit a lot from the process of art therapy, encouraging cognitive function and thought expression when they would otherwise struggle to do so, and helps them appreciate the present moment.

Art therapy is an activity that my grandma enjoys, watercolouring specifically, the medium representing feelings of nostalgia and reverie due to its muted and faded colour pigmentation. Watercolour artists like Heikala and Mateusz Urbanowicz inspired me a lot with their rationalised use of colours and line work, which also played a huge part in my visuals

With this in mind, I wanted to try to draw all my textures and decals by hand in Adobe Photoshop, using a watercolour brush that produced a paper texture as well as a muted and dream-like colouring of the room. The outlines and details that I drew on top, alongside adding distortion to each asset's mesh, added to the imperfection, haziness, and painterliness I wanted to achieve.

Since this was pretty much a one-to-one recreation of my grandma's flat, it took a lot of guesswork out of my project, allowing me to allocate more time to representing the meaningful symbolism throughout my composition. I had a visual library of photos and videos of her room, floor plans, and furniture placements, despite her looking at me funny, wondering why some person was whipping out a measuring tape on her bed. It was really important that I got the scale and position correct, as it helped to ground the project in reality and reinforce the immersive nature.

An important question was how I wanted to showcase my honours work. It felt like just having beauty renders wasn't going to do my project justice, and that it would be really hard for viewers to see the vision, so I really leaned into making it an immersive experience.

The code for the cinematography was done by my friend Finlay Laidlaw and was heavily inspired by the game "Life is Strange”, which allows the player to explore different parts of the room through the human FOV at the height of a short man (which is myself) and look around, while on a set timer that cycles through the shots.

The visuals are backed up by an original soundtrack by my friend Peter Baillie, which played a huge part in creating that nostalgic atmosphere and setting the pace for the interactive experience for the player. I recorded and added some family chatter to create an active ambience, which I looped to imitate the cyclical experience of talking to my grandma, in addition to the foley of the clock ticking to subtly remind the viewer of the passage of time in a world where everything is so fast-paced.

It encourages the audience to appreciate each second as they explore the environment at a slow pace. All of these elements helped to ground the experience in reality and aided with immersion, which was key. 

Blockout

Since I had a clear floor plan of my grandma's room and references for every angle, I started by creating a quick but clear blockout of the room, including as many assets as possible to get the rough idea of the plan. I then followed this with a simple Post Process Volume and lighting pass within Unreal Engine and played around with it to get a good idea of what I wanted. I wrote down different assets that had holes or gaps that can allow the foliage to come through, such as the open fridge or the AC ventilation, which made the foliage appear more natural and overgrown.  

I kept the modelling workflow really simple, having not baked anything, and wasn't afraid to increase the polycount in order to add some “stylisation” and wonkiness which helped accentuate the imperfections in the linework.

To keep things cohesive and to give homage to home, all the foliage is native and can be found in Hong Kong. I created the atlas base colour in Photoshop before exporting and building it in SpeedTree. By using the greybox, I was able to have the vines and foliage generated around it, making it feel natural and in place.

This method is iterative, which helped me edit any small things quickly within Photoshop and reimport them. Due to how small the scene was, I wasn't afraid to use a higher polycount on foliage meshes, as I wanted the foliage to sway with the wind shader. Since some of the shots were up close, it was important for the visuals that they felt natural and smooth. 

For all the fabric assets, I used Marvelous Designer for my grandma’s cardigan, pillows, towels, and bedding, as well as the curtains. This gave the environment some much-needed organicness and appeared more lived-in. 

I think what saved me the most time was having conducted a lot of research into Alzheimer’s, having real-world references of my specific foliage, and knowing the exact measurements of all my assets. After the base mesh was done, it was just a case of adding some extra loops, which allowed me to distort the silhouette of the furniture to portray the haziness and unfamiliarity that comes with viewing the world as someone with Alzheimer's.

Unwrapping

I used Autodesk Maya for UV unwrapping. Due to the simplistic nature of the models, it was just a case of manually unwrapping each face, making sure the islands were straightened up, and by organizing them yourself, you have a note of which face is which. This helps a lot when exporting the UV to Photoshop to paint on. 

I didn't do any sculpting or retopology for this project. All the organic assets were done in Marvelous Designer, which came with an in-quad optimisation for games, which more than did the job for me, and was just a case of reorganising their UV to suit myself for texturing. 

Texturing

The texturing workflow is really straightforward and relaxing. Once I created and organized the UV of my assets, I moved them onto Photoshop, where I reversed the black and white of the UV sheet, and on a separate layer, like a colouring book, I started colouring within the UV island.

I used a mix of Photoshop's “Kyle’s Real Watercolor – Rough” brush for the base colour and to give it the watercolor paper texture, I then went over each UV island with a “Kyle’s Ultimate Inking Thick ‘n Thin” brush in close to black to give it a outline, I also added some small marks.

I just painted raised edges, dents, and holes myself, as it helps show the watercolor style more. I wasn’t afraid to not have it perfect, scribble a little, or go over the UV lines, because at the end of the day, art therapy is about enjoying the process and the moment, and I wanted to embody that. The outline shader helped a lot of the smaller, rounder assets, where drawing an outline myself would look off while also adding an element of consistency to the lines on top of the manually drawn ones.

When selecting colours for my assets, I initially tried to match what the original colours were in my references, but I chose a more desaturated palette to maintain a sense of calm in the room. I found reds to be quite harsh for this environment, so I offset it with a more salmon pink, which allowed me to use those reddish shades while having them sit well amongst the rest of the assets.

I used the same methods for my decals, referencing them from my grandma’s room and the watercolour paintings she drew, which kept it consistent and, most importantly, cohesive with the rest of my environment. I used Adobe Photoshop’s filter gallery to obfuscate the photos on the newspapers taken from my film camera of Hong Kong and my family photos, enough to tell they are people but not who they are, symbolising the way in which Alzheimer’s affects my grandma’s perception of loved ones. Any time there was any writing, I scribbled logographic characters to add believability to the decals. 

To texture my foliage – I wanted to contrast the cold room with bright and warm colours – I used Kyle’s “Real Oils Brushy” brushes, the symbolism of oil paints show its ability to stand the test of time, keeping its colours and vibrancy celebrating the brighter time of my grandma’s life and how her influence on me will remain. Chinese Trumpet Creeper Vines, the red flowers, in Chinese culture symbolise luck, happiness, and prosperity, emphasising the vitality and joy she had, which comes with irony as they are poisonous by nature, highlighting the fragility of life. 

For the floor, I used Substance 3D Designer to get a base color and the water colour paper texture with a Perlin Noise node. I then went into Photoshop and created a mask of the tile pattern by hand and added it back in the Substance graph as a mask to add the colour and blur it. The walls were done with the same idea as I drew the details and outlines within Photoshop with the same inking brush mentioned before. 

To aid with the visual consistency and flatness, I set all roughness to 1 with no metallics and created a master material that just changes the saturation of the material even further for all my assets, apart from my foliage. This allowed me to further exaggerate the loneliness that comes with living with Alzheimer's. This gave the bright, saturated colours of my foliage a blank canvas-like base to really stand out, celebrating the life she had and creating that child-like wonder in my environment. 

Final Scene

I started with building the environment as closely as possible to the state the room was in when I took the references and measurements of my grandma's room. I wanted to make sure that the room felt as grounded in reality as possible.

This goes back to making sure the scale of the assets and architecture was as accurate as possible, the furniture was arranged as naturally as possible and giving each area attention, which gave me creative flexibility when it comes to setting up my camera shots.

All of this helped with keeping the environment grounded in reality and immersion, which was important to me. The photos and important assets were arranged in a way where the directional light would highlight the photos of her younger self, showcasing her prime and beauty, which leaves the photos of her current self and those around her in the dark, unable to be remembered.  

Lighting & Rendering

The purpose of my lights, other than to light up the scene, was to frame and highlight certain parts of the room, guiding the viewer’s eyes to the points of interest in my environment and shot, such as the photos of her when she was younger, leaving the modern photos in the dark, the forget-me-nots, and the clock ticking. With Lumen, the lighting was done using a single main directional light that shines through the window, supported by two cheat lights that highlight the forget-me-nots on the table and the clock on the wall (during its shot), which otherwise weren’t lit by the main light. The lighting also added warmth to the environment and accentuated the dust particles I created using Unreal’s Niagara particle system.

I tweaked the Post Processing Volume slightly to increase the bloom, but what gave it that soft, dreamlike look was adjusting the slope, toe, and shoulder in the Film tab, and finishing with a slight vignette. For color grading, I increased the color temperature and gamma for both the global and shadow settings, which helped bring in a vivid and nostalgic feel while also emphasizing the somber tone.

Challenges

The biggest challenge for me in doing this project was making sure I carried out the research properly, not only on my own, but also with support from the Alzheimer’s Society and through conversations with many peers and families about their own experiences. It was important to me that I did it justice, that the environment itself was grounded in reality, informed by as much research as possible, and artistically interpreted. That, in turn, only deepened the immersiveness of the cold reality when viewed or played.

I learned how important strong art direction and planning are in influencing the final results, shaping the work around the research I had done on Alzheimer’s. I wasn’t afraid to use more old-school pipeline methods because they suited the project’s needs.

I think the biggest advice I can give is to have faith in yourself and in your ability to bring what you imagine to life. Surround yourself with people – peers, friends, lecturers, and professionals in the industry – who have passion and care, no matter the discipline or field. They were the ones who pushed me to go further, gave me valuable feedback, held me to a high standard, and offered support I could never have found anywhere else.

Conclusion

My grandma has taught me to always appreciate the small things in life and the time you have and to spend that time doing the things you love, taking care of yourself, and looking after the ones you care about.

This project has given me the privilege and opportunity to speak with many people who have loved ones affected by Alzheimer’s. By sharing my own experiences and my grandma’s stories, I was able to create a safe space for others to open up and share their experiences with me.

This project wouldn’t have been possible without the help and support of my lecturers and friends, along with the incredible folks at Alzheimer’s Society, with whom I’m running a fundraiser to raise awareness, fund research, and support those living with Alzheimer’s and their carers.

Here is a link to the JustGiving page – 100% of proceeds go directly to the Alzheimer’s Society.

Thank you for taking the time to read this – much love!

Jeremy Wong, Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine