Description
Stone Dragon grows out of the stone dragon from Zuojiashan in Nong'an, Jilin. Ground from gray-white felsite and curled into the shape of a jue, an open ring, it pushed the history of dragon-shaped objects in China back by about a thousand years. The author took it as a thread because it ties this western, borderland corner of northeast China to a much longer memory of civilization.
In museums, the author had seen the sites of the northeast: house foundations, pots and bone needles sitting in display cases and reports, where no one can walk in or ask a single question. So, following their questions about the local ancestors, the author built a Neolithic world you can walk into. Approach a square house and you see the postholes, the gray-brown pots and the bone needles in people's hands, and you can ask the people there what houses they lived in, what they wore, what language they spoke, what work they did and what they revered. Where the material has an answer, they answer on the spot; where it doesn't, the answer stays at conjecture, and you can see where that line falls.
The distant riverbank and terraces are laid out by World Labs, while the houses, objects and people are made with Tripo and layered into a walkable foreground. It is a gift for archaeology lovers, and for anyone who wants to know who their ancestors were.
How Tripo was used
Tripo makes everything you can walk up to; the foreground and the layer of daily life run on it.
- Houses and objects: the houses, pots, grass, branches and bone tools were generated with Tripo one by one and placed on a foreground ground plane that follows the colliders and fades out at the edges.
- The people: the people in the houses were also generated with Tripo, then rigged, so they step forward and speak to visitors.
- Two layers with World Labs: World Labs lays out the distant riverbank and terraces, Tripo's houses, pots and people sit on the ground it provides, and Three.js adds shadows to the foreground. Without Tripo, visitors couldn't enter the square houses or ask their questions.
