The things that we want to improve and work on for our final submission are the following:
- More AI ( Animals, Sounds )
- Each building having a different function
- make the pool area more interactive ( maybe add more beach chairs, beach balls )
- Add the plants in the glass boxes
- Lighting ( Switch on and off ?)
These are some weaknesses that our team would like to work on, and improve further, but getting into the actual project we may find some other ideas or we can push the other ones on further.
Note Location of the folders
- The map --> C:Program Files/Electronic Arts/Crytek/Crysis/Game/Levels
- objects --> C:Program Files/Electronic Arts/Crytek/Crysis/Game
In this particular project the final submission was a challenge as we had to complete everything in the final submission including the atmospherics, the lighting , the sound, video’s and the furnishing of our building. As a team we had to action our weaknesses before we could continue on the project itself. One main weakness, or one the aspects is the space that has not been created yet. Having no concept of space sort of did not define or help convey our concepts , and needs to be worked on. The other weakness is presentation of the building. Although it is preliminary work, it still needs to have some sort of form, just to show what it will look like in the end form.
The crymod website was really useful in most stages of the project, it provided the necessary information to execute the tasks. Through out the Project there were various hiccups, mostly time consuming or even just our group not agreeing on things.The first one was the terrain, as a group we had to completely agree on the final terrain, now that was a problem because some of us wanted it to convey an oasis and others wanted it to be conveyed as an desert just isolated in the middle of no where ? So we ended up created an area for a single dwelling in the middle of no where, there are strong themes of isolation and desertification. The building looks quite beautiful and aesthetically pleasing in the Twilight.
Another challenge is not to allow water from the outside environment dominate that of which is in the building, because the water aspect is the most important feature of the building. And if we placed the water outside the building then that in turn would seriously affect the themes and concept of being isolated.
When having to arrange the furniture it was not as easy as it seems, just by dropping it in the building. The things that need to seriously be taken into consideration spacing between them, and also the layout. The problem in crysis was to organise objects in crysis, especially in the building. For example when the origin point of any particular building is inside the building but when confused of the orientation the object is outside. And that is when placing furniture in crysis becomes time consuming. In regards to furniture it proved to be difficult as because when importing into crysis, you cannot export all the furniture all at once, because errors occur and some of the furniture does not appear which in essence changes the aesthetics of the space.
Then the next task was to create the lighting, same as the objects, that was the problem that was encountered, it was very time consuming starting the lighting over again, the lighting also had to be tested during the night and day, for practical purposes.
As time runs short, the team is starting to feel the classical pressure of "are we going to finish this on time?"
Luckily, the team is following the projected schedule as tightly as possible (of course, this update was a result of a delayed self-reminder).
As of this point, the terrain is near completion (about 99% - there seems to be just something that has not yet been included). The video below shows how the terrain looks as it is:
The building model is at a satisfactory level. There is no wow-factor, but note that it is still incomplete. It will be revised once every prelim-secondary aspect is finalized and in-place. Also, when all the new, never before encountered technical issues are resolved. The images are as follows:
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.
