FIEA Common Art - "Pokémon VR" (2022)

During my first three semesters at FIEA, I was in a Common Art class with all of the other artists in the cohort, regardless of discipline. The main goal of this class was to work towards a big, overarching project that would span the entire class - a virtual reality experience, based around adapting an existing IP. The group I found myself on settled on Pokémon, and we decided that our experience would recreate the iconic Pokémon game introduction - meeting your first Pokémon in a professor's lab and subsequently having your first battle - with the player as the star.
As always, on this team, I played the role of an environmental artist, and, together with the other environment artist on this project, Akshay Dodia, created the various props that gave our Pokémon lab it's distinct appearance. We were attempting to emulate the visual style and laboratory layout of a specific game in the Pokémon franchise - that being "Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!," a recent title with a well-defined 3D art style to replicate. We did take some creative liberties here and there in the name of adapting the style to a VR experience - we needed to make room in the lab for a battle arena, we created the Pokémon pen from whole cloth because we wanted the player to be able to see them, and we had to up-rez everything to make it look good in virtual reality.
All that said, though, I do feel like we got a pretty faithful recreation of the look and feel of the game, I think I managed to do a great job of adapting the flat, cartoony, hyper-stylized art of Pokémon to something that works well in VR, and I feel like the groundwork I laid with my environment design early on was a factor that helped the project pass the initial culling. In any case, here's a comprehensive accounting of all the stuff I made for the project. If you'd like more information, you can check out the following links to my FIEA art blog, where you can see me track the progress of my art assets over the course of two semesters.
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/01/common-art-ii-sprint-1-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/02/common-art-ii-sprint-2-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/02/common-art-2-sprint-3-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/02/common-art-2-sprint-4-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/03/common-art-2-sprint-5-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/04/common-art-2-sprint-6-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/04/common-art-2-sprint-7-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/05/common-art-3-sprint-1-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/06/common-art-3-sprint-2-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/06/common-art-3-sprint-3-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/07/common-art-3-sprint-4-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/07/common-art-3-sprint-5-updates.html
https://patrickmannfiea.blogspot.com/2022/08/common-art-looking-back-at-virtual.html