Initial development
Asset recreation from the movie was on the top of my list of things to get correct. My initial approach to building out the scene was to watch the movie multiple times and timecode points where the shots offered the most open view of the environmental design. Unfortunately, one of the hallmarks of the director Sam Raimi is to throw the camera around the space with highly frantic cuts to create a sense of unease and tension for the audience. This is wonderful while watching the movie but infuriating when trying to build a recreation of the Knowby cabin.
After watching certain scenes multiple times, I was able to build a map of the space on paper with rough positioning for each object that should be in the scene.
This method proved to be difficult to try and gain a sense of scale of the room and the assets within it. For better reference material, I played ‘Evil Dead: The Game’ (Saber, 2023) to explore the environment for a more stable examination of the cabin.
Using Ansel (Nvidia, 2023) I was able to disable the heads-up display within the game engine and move the playable character model out of frame to gain high resolution screenshots. This provided the backbone for developing the size and scale of elements to a further degree and allowed for me to plan how much of the environment beyond where the user would stand would be visible.
To ensure I had the correct scaling when building the assets for the scene, I imported a model and scaled it up to 1.85m which is the height of lead actor Bruce Campbell. Using this as a rough reference, I was able to keep the model size consistant when compared to frames from the movie.
My initial idea was to overlay 2D planes from the game into my experience, but this lacked the depth and stood out from the assets I had generated in my scene. This was rectified by creating low poly spaces to serve as the bedroom and the kitchen which are both visible from the centre of the cabin and provided additional depth and suggest a richer environment beyond what the user could directly see.
