Another project I worked on in between breaks was the Crystal Cavern. The Crystal Cavern was based on a fantasy world I imagined when I was a kid. The cavern is part of a magical cave called the Cave of Destiny. The cave is to test the hero's strength by going through trials judged by the guardians of the cave. The Crystal Cavern is the final test for the heroes to be judged from their previous trials and by the purity of their hearts. Their final task is to be seek final judgement by the wise crystal owl perched on the stone book of records. 

       Throughout the years I made very rough sketches of the cave. Most of the designs had it look like a dead end to a hallway. When I looked at the drawings I made, I felt it wouldn't make sense if a cave looked like a dead end hallway. So I took to the internet looking at caverns to find the exact design I needed to update this part of the Cave of Destiny.

     I think what inspired me to create a crystal cavern was having a place where a hero would gain a magical power by obtaining a powerful crystal. It would be different than an evolution stone you find in a Pokemon game and  it wouldn't be a shiny rock to place onto a staff like Gandalf used in the Mines of Moria in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. It wasn't until I watch Genndy Tarakovsky's Star Wars the Clone Wars series again that gave me the creative spark to make a highly clustered environment full of colorful glowing crystals to make this place magical.  In one of the episodes a Jedi master took her Padiwan to a cave full of crystals that would help power a light saber. 

     This project was massive in experimenting a balance between lighting and glass crystal texturing to get the design just right.