On Thursday ( 23rd April 2009) we once again resumed class back to normal. We had the pleasure of a guest lecturer once again from the field of psychology to speak to us about Team and Group psychology. We found this to be of particular interests as working in a group has its pro's and con's. It gave us some insights as how to behave with others, so not to cause rifts and cause major blow ups. But that all again depends on personalities being put together and have to work on an individual idea. We think that this is one of the biggest challenges faced with any group, but we are very fortunate that everyone compromises and our work gets done.
This particular group meeting we discussed how we will action all the tasks that need to be completed, we also were not happy with the terrain because our theme is about an oasis in a desert and too exemplify that, we have to be careful of our vantage points and our location.
Today (04-April-09), we had a guest lecturer named Michael Brand, from Construction Management and Property. He presented many interesting aspects of conflict. Firstly, he gave us an idea about the overall structure of stakeholders in an organisation or a project. In any projects, it generally involves clients, managers, architects, general contract, and sub contract. As there are a number of people working in the same project, it is hard to avoid conflict. Michael presented us to various causes of conflict and suggested a number of resolutions. The major causes that he stated include mutually inconsistent goals, lack of trust, authority relationships, too much emphasis on price, low capital backing, risk transference, lack of participation, and subcontracting outsourcing. Another important dispute is about payment. 70% of payment claim dispute is between a contractor and a subcontractor. This can cause a significant impact on collaboration and an overall project. He suggested that the best way of resolution is by negotiation. Negotiation does not only direct to the end result but it is also the best way to keep a good relationship between team members.
After the lecture, we had our team draft presentation. Our team was the 4th team in the class. We were all quite excited as we prepared our presentation slightly different from other teams. Our presentation was focused on the progress of our project, the problems and resolutions that we encountered, whereas other teams emphasised the details and concept of their buildings. However, we had tried our best to give as much as information to the class. At the end, we gathered a lot of great feedback and interesting ideas and perspectives from the class.
E-volve Draft Fabrication
Strengths - Good connection between the building on the site and landscape - Good portrayal of desert environment on the theme of survival
Weaknesses - Access to the building within Crysis needs to be considered. - The structure detail of the building (exterior and interior) needs to be further analysed.
Other teams’ draft fabrications
Strengths - Omega – Good deep analysis and portrayal of the building related to the surrounding landscape, urban and harbour - Atlar – Great realistic underwater environment by creating sea lives, reefs, rocks, random and uneven looking terrain
Weaknesses - Orange - The disproportionate scale and size of building
- Digilism – Unrealistic size of terrain
The environment that we wanted to create was something that could be placed anywhere and be adaptable to its surroundings and still depict the nature of its original design. Well city was inspired by S. Patrizio's sink, which was characterised by a flight of steps, that turns into a central space that contains water, and that has many openings, where is possible to observe a central space. It is based on a semi-hipogen space; a visible level that contains a living room, a kitchen with spaces.
Well City provided a some major hurdles which also turned into learning experiences for some, the first step in reproducing this unbuilt architecture in Crysis was its scale, now because all that was provided for us were the early design concepts, we were not given dimensions of the building. So we dissected the plans and the given sections, created a 1:100 scale. We thought this would be suited best as it was very conventional and easily adapted to our building.
We then built our terrain, because well city is based on being able to survive in the desert, the naturally suited environment was sand and dunes, with a flat plateau for the site of the building. One of our hurdles was the positioning of our site and its orientation, as we were playing with the natural light of the real time environment.
The next step was re-modelling the building in Revit architecture,we had to break down the individual spaces and then create a relationship within each space.The basic functions that were used were the wall tools, setting different heights on floors and placement of stairs.
The fourth Step was the textures, now the first task we had was the selection of the textures, we choose the textures so it can evoke a sense of mystery and anticipation as “ Well City “ is underground. The standard materials that were chosen was the Stone, wood, waterand glass. This would prove to be our biggest challenge yet. We encountered major problems in importing the materials into crysis. The texture was put in sketch up first, then exported to Crysis, but at first it seemed it worked, but after the second time it was attempted,the textures were no longer there. The way that we tried solving this was by using an alternative of 3ds max, now once again we had problems as 3ds max 2009 is not supportedby Crysis.So then 3ds max 9 was used and we installed SDK plug in. Unfortunately the end result was it has not been resolved to date, it is still being vigilantly actioned.
The next step was the lighting, we thought this would be the easiest of all the tasks to be actioned, the only hurdle was the intensity of the light, which proved to be frustrating as we would be placed 20 entities in the same location. So the way we solved the problem was that we realised the display quality had to be changed.
The next step was the sound, we thought would test it out, just so we could play around with it in the draft stages instead of doing it very last minute. We did all the correct steps, but choosing the sound was difficult as no sounds were loaded on our crysis editor, so we once again were confused in what went funny.
So,overall we believe that we have overcome a lot of difficulties that were faced with this particular un built architecture, we believe that we have completed a lot of ground work for this difficult concept, and believe that we can reproduce it on crysis if not the same,even better than its original design.
During the lecture today Jeremy talked to us about whats happening in the week to come. We discussed the class wiki and how to use it, and how it should be used. Our draft model is due next week which Jeremy talked us through what is required. Each team then had to present their progress and their contribution to the team, our group discussed the problems we had and the steps we will take to resolve them.
During the tutorial we assigned individual tasks to one another and what date they should be completed by, as everything is linked together so it is important that each person gets their tasks done by the date given. We couldn't get much work done as the XPS laptop we had did not have sandbox 2 installed., we had a copy of Crysis which we were going to install on the XPS but then another problem occured, the DVD-ROM drive wasn't working.Wirada created a timetable for our group members which gives us deadlines of when we should finish our assigned tasks by.
In studio class, we had a keep internet connection problem, but that was overcome shortly. We discussed the various unbuilt architecture researches amongst each other, but it had already been settled, last week, that our chosen architectural is eVolo's Well City (or else see Swati's blog).
The Chosen One
Even though there were potential buildings to choose from, we agreed to keep the selection simple and allow us to be open with terrain and surroundings. The Well City offers unlimited opportunities to the potential setting and although it is numerous, the simplicity of the design and ability to clone objects allow this project to be effectively fabricated and processed.
The Unchosen One
The building that wasn't chosen was eVolo's skyscraper. This descision was made solely because it does not offer an open mind for terrain and environment and thusly, the setting has already been defined by the original architect.
8 Potential Problems And then we went on to discuss potential challenges that we would encounter along the way. As of now, the challenges are:
Creating water within the buildings
Drilling a perfect rectangular hole
Lighting of the rooms
Importing materials to Crysis
Importing miscellaneous objects to Crysis
Creating the cave for the well
Recreating the space (scale) with the information available
Correct flow of water (well to pool)
And these potential problems are to be encountered within the weeks to come.
Terrain Progress
Texture Progress
