IDP Palimpsest (Team 6): Fairy Town Across Seasons (21Jan-11Feb)
I’m posting this a bit late, but I wanted to write it properly as a personal record of what I learned and what I actually contributed during the IDP.
This Interdisciplinary Project was built around “University as a Palimpsest” the idea that places hold layers of history, and even when something changes, traces remain. Our brief pushed projection + scanning and the goal was to create a short public-facing experience.
How the idea shifted (and why)
At the start, our group explored three directions:
Dance evolution over time — projecting dance footsteps on the floor as an interactive piece. It sounded fun but quickly felt risky in terms of clarity and control in a public space, so we moved on.
Fashion eras on a mannequin — projection-mapping different fashion eras onto a mannequin, with each era overwriting the last while leaving traces like labels and stitched patterns. I liked the “layering” metaphor here, but we weren’t sure it would read instantly in the exhibition setup.
Fairy town across seasons (final) — the turning point came when we were walking around campus and found a small arrangement of logs that looked like a tiny neighborhood. That discovery made the palimpsest theme feel real: like we were looking at “remains” of something that existed before. That’s when the idea clicked.
Building the palimpsest: seasons as layers
Once the fairy-town idea was chosen, our concept development became much smoother. We used seasonal transformation as the layering method:
Summer (warm, alive)
Autumn (leaf layer, shift in mood)
Winter (snow layer, stillness)
The key was making it feel like a palimpsest, not three separate scenes so we designed it so traces remain (for example: autumn marks still faintly visible under winter). We also added a subtle “university” link through library/book/study cues inside the town, so the theme didn’t drift into pure fantasy.
Concept arts made by one of my team member Linh
My contribution: building the environment across three seasons
My main role was the 3D environment work, and I treated it like a base that could be “re-skinned” into seasons without rebuilding everything from scratch.
1) Summer (base environment)
I started with the summer environment, because that becomes the foundation for everything else. I:
built the buildings to match the concept art proportions and silhouette
created stylised grass using Geometry Nodes
set up bushes and ground dressing that kept the scene readable and not too noisy
This stage was mostly about getting the feel right while staying practical: clean shapes, consistent style, and a scene that would still read well when lit or projected.
2) Autumn (same structure, different world)
For autumn, I reused the same grass and bush setup but shifted it into an autumn palette and scattered some autumn leave around the environment . I liked this part because it proved the “palimpsest” idea visually: the same world is still there, but the season overwrites how it feels.
It was also a good workflow lesson building things procedurally meant I could iterate quickly without destroying what already worked.
3) Winter (procedural snow interacting with the existing setup)
Winter was the most technical (and the most satisfying). I created procedural snow that interacted with the existing geometry and covered the scene from the top down and for the Christmas light feel using curve wire method to produce the wire from and procedurally attaching the lights around the wire all using geometry nodes . The goal wasn’t just “add white everywhere” it was to make the snow feel like it was genuinely sitting on surfaces and collecting naturally.
This was where the environment really became layered. Autumn/summer wasn’t deleted it was buried. That’s basically palimpsest in 3D form.
Final outcome (and why it worked)
In the final stage, the piece came together as a small diorama where the visuals were projected in layers, so the seasonal change felt like overwriting rather than separate scenes. That “layering” is what made it feel like a palimpsest: not a reset, but traces continuing underneath the new surface.
The project was completed and submitted on 11 Feb 2026.
What I learned
The biggest lesson for me was that procedural thinking helps a lot in short projects. Geometry Nodes let me build once and then adapt fast. It also made the seasonal idea stronger, because the same underlying setup could carry multiple “overwrites” without losing consistency.
I also realised that “readability” is everything in a group project like this. It’s easy to over-detail, but for projection and quick viewing, clean silhouettes and big readable forms win.