If I were to imagine an item from a bygone era that didn’t belong in that time, I think the thing I would need most is an ‘air conditioner’. Although the weather in London is still pleasant in late May, in my native China the average temperature is close to 30 degrees Celsius. The heat is unbearable on such a hot summer day, so I imagine it would be great if an air conditioner could be made in ancient East Asia!
The first modern air conditioner in history was invented by Willis Haviland Carrier in the USA in 1902, just over a hundred years ago, so it is not an easy technology to replicate. In ancient East Asia – to be precise, I have chosen the period around 600-900 AD, during the Tang dynasty in ancient China – it would have been almost impossible to create an air conditioner that worked on modern principles.
So I had to consider a number of factors, including but not limited to the materials used to make it, the technology, the style and so on, to try to bring back this great modern invention to a time a thousand years ago.
To solve all these complex problems, I needed to consider both the modern principles of how air conditioning works and how to reproduce them in some clever way in ancient East Asia. The former is a matter of practical scientific theory, the latter is a matter of fanciful ideas. For this, I needed a lot of reference material. Luckily, the large number of professional artists on Pinterest is an excellent reference, which makes it much more efficient for me to create reference boards. My main references are industrial objects that combine the techniques of two or more different eras at the same time. “The combination of different eras is, in my opinion, the most important part of the subject to think about.
How do you make an object that could not have existed in that time period? What technology do I need to consider to replace modern science, while at the same time ensuring that the object is as effective as possible? Perhaps the resemblance could be abandoned altogether, as it would deprive my work of its unique properties. Instead, I could have created a product that looked so odd that it would have been impossible to imagine its prototype at first glance! And that’s why I believe the audience will be more than surprised when it functions like its prototype.
With this in mind, I was most taken with the work of the artist named thaigraff nat. You can see that he has combined intelligent robots, a symbol of the future age, with ancient oriental armour to create a group of very handsome and majestic looking warriors. Although the product I wanted to design, the air conditioner, was far from being a soldier, I think I could still learn a lot from it in terms of design concepts.
For example, I appreciate the high level of generalisation of the elements in these pieces. There is a limit to the number of elements an object can hold, and too many complicated elements means too much information, which only makes the design feel redundant to the viewer, so I think it is important to summarise an object in a concise way and with fewer elements. In these works, the decorations of ancient East Asian soldiers are summed up in a clear and concise manner and interpreted stylistically, resulting in an extremely informative yet uncomplicated design.
Entering the Concept sketches stage, most of the designs in the early stages, probably partly influenced by the reference material, have a robotic concept. In fact, given the Brief’s requirement for the final model to have moving parts, most of my designs initially tended to make the ‘ancient air conditioner’ a potentially mobile machine, hence the many designs such as legs and wheels.
But as I developed it, I realised that it was not important for an air conditioner to be mobile, I could not ignore the concept of the prototype just because I wanted to show the uniqueness of the design, i.e. not to make my final product look like an air conditioner
On top of this, the design has been improved to essentially erase the free movement of the legs. In order to create a new movable part, I started to think about the refrigeration method and also tried to include more period-appropriate elements that symbolise ancient East Asia in the design.
In the end, I tried to add a rotating fan to the top of the machine, with a large amount of ice to cool it, and this led to the general idea of the ‘Ancient East Asian Air Conditioner’.
Enter the model making phase. The first attempt was to use the ancient Greek architecture that I had used in my project last year with Blender’s own monkey model to try and simulate how my design would look, which eventually put me off using a design that contained a human face directly (which looked a bit scary).
It was also at this stage that I decided to create a simple oriental building to appear as a scene in the background of the final film. Traditional oriental art is all about a sense of atmosphere and it would have been a shame if my final product had to be placed in an empty background..
The most important part of my “Ancient East Asian Air Conditioner”, a fan-like device, has begun to be built. The principle of this machine is to create cold air by means of a fan that rolls up the wind and combines it with the ice cubes in the two fans. A fine fan is therefore the most important part of the design (it needs to be spinning magnificently).
I designed the fan blades in the shape of clouds, which in ancient China signify good luck. I simply built a few rough models of clouds by referring to some of the ancient Chinese paintings or architecture and finally chose one of them as the fan blade for the finished model.
The pattern of the disc at the centre of the fan blade is also based on the testimony of ancient Chinese architectural design, which was the most time-consuming step in the making of this model..
Make ice models and fabric models. As the main important raw material in the operating principle of this machine, a nice, clean, huge block of ice is a must. I followed some tutorials on Youtube and tried to make a material of this ice block to make it look as realistic as possible.
In the meantime, I have tried to model some of the fabrics. The fabrics were not only intended to enrich the background design, but more importantly, I saw them as a concrete means of representing the ‘wind’ in my film. As we all know, wind cannot be seen, so I had to use other means to make the viewer aware that the machine in the film was actually generating ‘wind’, and the curtains blown up by the wind were the perfect choice. The East Asian style decals on the curtains also add to the ambience of the scene.
I also did a simple ambient lighting design to make the whole scene look more beautiful.