Project "Well City"

The following images and videos below is the final fabrication of our project "Well City".

Below is a link to download the final version of Well City.

Team E-volve - Well City

Enjoy.

Trailer

Extended Trailer

External view.

Another external view.

Looking down into the pool area.

Pool area.

Kitchen and living room.

Looking down into the well.

Pool area.

Look up into the night.

Main pool area.

Bedroom.

Fixing Well City

The last couple of days I've been working on fixing up my teams fabrication. During the presentation we had some major problems, first it was the building flashing, second is the map runs very slow. Firstly I fixed up some of the textures, the fish tanks looked see through and not that visible during the night, so I added the wet and frost effect to the tank making it more visible. The swimming pool's texture has also been changed, it now has some ripple effect instead of being a clear flat looking surface.

Since I had to go a couple of steps back this involved redoing some of the things that was previously done. The lighting is now fixed up, extra lighting fixtures also have been added and also light switches. The lighting colour is still a warm yellowish orange colour, but it is not as intense and bright as the previous one. The doors, and their rotations have been fixed up, this part was really annoying, sometimes the doors would disappear once in a while. Some parts of the building was flashy and had to be covered up with a solid then textures, this also was done with gaps within the building.

Placement of the buildings had to be redone, making holes and placing them in, also covering up the bits that are open on the sides. Covering up the bits that were open was done by using solids to fill in the gaps, then the land was modified so it would look natural.

The final result, personally I think it is alot better, this time you can actually walk around the map, but there is still a bit of lag when playing on high specs, either than that everything else is all good.

The images below displays the process of fixing up well city.

The living room's new lighting.

Master bedroom's new lighting.

The light switch.

Fixed up doors that open the right way.

The new water texture, notice the noise ripple effect.

The fish tank is now more visible during the night, thanks to the wet and frost applyed to it.

Extra lighting and fixtures.

View from inside the pool looking up.

The gaps that have been filled with solids.

Placement of the well houses.

Finally finished everything.

Final Post – Contribution & Collaboration

At the start of the semester I thought having random people in your group would not go so smoothly, as I didn’t really know them well enough and haven’t worked with them before. But as the weeks progressed and collaboration comes into play I got to know my team a little better. I’ve learnt why Jeremy had put us into random groups, like he said “in the real world you cannot choose who you want to work with” this statement made is true. In most cases, working on the same project you usually don’t get a choice who you want to work with, so this became a good learning experience for each of us and will prepare us for the real world.

As time progressed further into due dates you can see which individual of the team really put an effort to what they do and the amount of quality. When we had a group discussion on who was going to do what, I choose to build the entire model with the kitchen which was done in Revit. Working out the room layouts took a while to do, as some spaces of the building were not clearly defined.The ramp area took a while to figure out, but the most important thing to me was to try and get those two conceptual perceptive views provided by the architects. As the end result I think the two views we had looked really similar.

Whilst I was working on the building Jackey was working on the terrain for the placement of the building. The model was then handed to Wirada for placement of furniture and textures of the building. I helped Wirada out on the ideas of textures in building, the final texture of the building was chosen by myself, it was a standard texture in sketch up which I adjusted the colour so it would look similar to the conceptual design, I also suggested using white window frames just to keep similarities. Another one of my tasks was water, I created the pool area using water volumes in Crysis and added a water type texture to it.

I then added windows to the building, when re-building the model, windows were taken into consideration for two reasons, one was lighting issues, and the other was to have a visual relationship between the exterior and interior spaces. Fish tanks was a main feature of our fabrication, this was a must have as the tanks resembles life within the well and gives it a different experience. I also had to redo the entire lighting of the building, as the previous one the colour of the lights were not adjusted, they were just basically default lighting placed onto the map with no further adjustments. I also contributed to the team blog with some of the weekly updates. Throughout the weeks our team was constantly giving each other feedback on individual’s thoughts and inputs into the fabrication, this is important to having a better outcome.

In conclusion this course was a great learning experience, real-time environment is not only fun to do but I think it will one day become the standard of presenting your works to a client. Collaboration was the main key area of focus; all those twelve collaboration topics we talked about were all experienced by each team in some way. Working with my team was cool; (they were all new to me) we had good times working with one another, it’s good to know that you can still have a bit of a laugh now and then, but when it comes down to getting serious work done, we get it done. From this real-time experience, at this moment in time I think I'll be definitely be using Crysis for my graduation project.

I would like to thank my group members for their efforts and contribution, and Jeremy and Graham for their support and guidance.

Cheers
Wilson.

Final Presentation

During the final presentation today we had some guests in the audience. Due to Jackey's exam we were booked to present last. Every teams presentation went pretty well, they all done alot of polishing since the last presentation. Most teams polished up on textures, and adding in furniture into their fabrication. Its good to know how they all collaborated together to produce something really amazing, but collaboration in some of the groups was a little bumpy.

When our group went up to present, their was a major problem which was the flashy lights. This problem caused everything to lag dramatically, and the viewers were getting quite annoyed. Lucky Jeremy seen the photos we posted up before hand, which proved that we didn't have the problem before and that the lighting went pretty well. Either than that I guess every else went pretty smoothly. If I get time I'll probably go through and try find out what is causing the flashy effects and lag, cause it is really annoying to have, especially when you work on a project so long and hard and the outcome is not what you expected.

More Image Captures

Below are some more images captures I took after finishing the lighting. Note these shots were captured during the night.

The ramp gallery. Having windows helped provide natural lighting to these spaces that would of been dark in the original design.

Entry, living room and dining room.

View of the well area and the fish tanks that are hung within the walls.

External night view of the exterior.

Another external capture.

Last Group Session

I got to uni around 6pm today with the work I done, which was completed windows, fish tanks, and the well water. I loaded it up in the labs and noticed that my textures for some of the glass and water did not show. This problem was resolved 30mins later when all you had to do to save the texture was rename it after you inputted the settings. Today I had to take out the lighting that Swati done yesterday night. The lighting was very dull, and the colour of the lights didn't seem to make the place any better, this had to be changed.

After I fixed the texturing problems, Wirada started to work on AI within the environment, the AI used is pretty good, she used some smart objects which made the AI do all sorts of actions such as sitting down. Jackie then finished placing doors within the building. I started to work on re-doing the lighting, at first I set all the objects to cast shadows, I added simple lights and adjusted the colour of the lighting to orange, this made the building feel more warm and welcoming. The light's colour multiplier adjusts the intensity of the lights, this setting had to be carefully adjusted, upping this value too much could over brighten the rooms. My team mates and I were really impressed by the lighting, I never thought I could get the perfect setting on the first few go's of trying.

Then disaster strikes, the screen froze, had the blue screen pop up, then restarted. Our work was all on the primary drives, which we all know cleans out every time you restart, so we are now delayed a few hours back, so tragic. I'm really feeling on the down low right now.

I finally finished re-doing what we lost, which was, placing the fish tanks, and lightnings. Lighting then became a problem, problem was I couldn't get that cool light setting I had before, I got it quite similar but not as wow as before. I think it wasn't as good as before because the first time we saw it was also the first time experiencing lights. Anyhow the end results are shown in the images below. (Please note that the images shown are taking during the night)

Lighting in the top floor bedroom.

On top of the building, looking down into the well.

Master bedroom.

Another bedroom.

Dining and living room.

Pool area.

I quickly checked the placement of the glass to the window frames, all good. I had to leave so I reminded Jackie and Wirada the tasks left which needs to be done, the presentation room, fixing up the flashy elements within the building, adding doors and AI again, put in lighting fixtures so it doesn't look like nothing is lighting up the rooms. Once these tasks are done the building is going to be grouped into one object, holes have to be made on the land for the building to sit in. The placement of the well buildings are up to Jackie and Wirada.

Hopefully all goes to plan.

Fish Tanks

The fish tanks in well city is one of the most important features that we must have in our fabrication. The fish tanks gives the well a sense of pure escape, a relaxing pool area that when looked up upon the inner walls are decorated with fish tanks. Personally I think if our fabrication did not have these fish tanks it would just look really plain and ordinary, the feeling of the environment will defiantly be alot different. I did get the fish working inside the fish tank, but problems occurred, as my tank was fairly small, the fish would at times swim out of the tank and float around in mid air. This problem did not get resolved, I couldn't risk a finished fabrication and have fish just floating around outside the tanks.

Below are images of my progress to completion.

The shape of the tank.

Testing out the water inside the fish tank.

Another view of the final tank form.

Swimming inside the tank, which has vegetation.

Placement of the fish tanks in the pool area of the building.

Windows Windows Windows

Creating windows is not as easy as it seems, you have to create a thin solid and re-scale it so it fits into the window frames. At first I just made one large rectangle which spreads across 4 window frames. But I then realised that if you shot the glass, it does not shatter properly, in other words if you shoot the glass it effects the glass next to it, its not restricted by the window frames.

Every window had to be re-scaled and put into place properly so that the glass sits in the middle of the frames. This process may seem simple to do, but its very time consuming. Glass textures were then added to the solids, a problem then came up, some windows did not shatter as they were set to do. To resolve this problem the only thing I could think of was to copy and paste the other windows that did shatter.

The windows were now done, I have two different textures for the windows. The upper glazing is more darker than the one below it. Right now I'm just trying to get everything to look as close as possible to the two perspectives provided from the conceptual drawings.

Below are images showing my progression.

Monday Group Session

Today we had yet another group meeting to share our problems and progression. Problems were texturing, and flashy textures, which all became resolved after an hour or so. I soon got to work on creating glass and texturing them, a little bit of experimentation is needed with glass to get the right tint, going for a mid blue colour. Whilst Swati is working on updating the team journal and creating lightings, Jackey figuring out how doors work and operate within Crysis, Wirada is finding textures for fittings such as doors.

Glass is not as simple as it seems, it takes a while getting a perfect fit into the window frames, I think our overall building texture looks really nice, very similar to the conceptual renders that were provided. We managed to get the two views (requested by Jeremy) of the conceptual renders. Swati is now working on lighting, I'm just hoping that the lighting doesn't slow down our map as it did before in the week 8 fabrication, this caused a major problem as it made the map very laggy and you could not navigate your way through the map properly. After shes done ill put in the water for the well and private swimming pool, and create the fish tanks that will be hung off the inner walls of the well, hopefully if all goes well the only thing we have to do tomorrow is A.I, the presentation room, reference materials, objects, and the video scenes.

Advanced Level Specialisation

I found this video clip, which I think is at an advanced skill level to do. I personally do not know how to create this, which is a rocket launcher with its own HUD and even a missile tracking system. Seems like you may have to alter the game more, and most likely edit some C++, create your own images and text, and most definately scripting for the auto tracking of the missle. This link may if updated show a tutorial on how they did this, it is obviously achievable.

Reference:

Source: Hud View, Crymod, http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=42512&threadview=0&hilight=hud&hilightuser=0&page=1, (Date Accessed 14th June 2009)

Source: Hud View2, Crymod, http://www.crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=42512&threadview=0&hilight=hud&hilightuser=0&page=1, (Date Accessed 14th June 2009)

Source: Javelin Hud Test, Youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Rli5cgMEY, (Date Accessed 14th June 2009)

Modding a HUD - Another Attempt

I decided to switch to Flash CS3 to make things easier as the tutorial also uses Flash CS3. The tutorial which I used started out pretty easy, I was actually flying threw it pretty quickly. This by the way is a pre-made layout for the HUD, which then in Flash you have to edit the text fields into dynamic text, the difference between this tutorial and the others is that this one uses text to change the amount of health, ammo, and energy, whilst the others uses flash animations e.g. creating a health bar, green to red to display health.

The images below shows my progression.

During the tutorial it states that doing the C++ is not necessary and the HUD "should" still work, unfortunately for me it doesn't. So after editing all the text to dynamic, you save then export the file, then create the Mods folder within the Crysis directory, rename the file to .gfx. You then now have to find the sdk file, in which after doing some research I found out that you need to download a program called Mod SDK, installing this program failed on me.

Above: The error when trying to install MOD SDK

But if you do happen to get it working and open up the SDK file, you then can go through find and edit the C++ as shown in the pictures in the tutorial. I'm still not quite sure on how to launch the MOD, the picture belows shows an external program used to quickly launch the mod, it could be MOD SDK. Anyhow the flash file should be saved into the directory Crysis/Mods/MyMod/Game/Libs/UI

Group Session

Today we had a group meeting, this meeting gave Jackey, Wirada and myself a chance to see how everything is coming together, I finished my model in Revit a couple of days ago, Wirada is working on texturing and importing the building and other objects into Crysis, while Jackie finishes modifying the terrain which looks really well. The textures chosen for this the building had to be changed, I noticed that the wall textures looked stretched thus making it blurry. I went to search for textures, the end result was using a standard texture on sketch up, which I adjusted the colour so it would look similar to the conceptual perspective provided.

I also learned something useful today, I went through the tutorial on how to import textured models into Crysis, seems really easy to do with sketch up, all thanks to Wirada's blog. I did this to experiment how different types of themes would suit the interior.

Above: The texture I have chosen for the walls throughout the building, the above walls (purple, orange) was the textures before, which will be changed.

Above: I'm hoping if we get enough time that this is what the theme of our kitchen will look like, personally I think it will match up, as our building has light coloured walls, and white window frames.

I'm choosing themes for rooms because on the old fabrication colours did not match up really well, having a set theme or style throughout the building will create consistency for the eye, also rooms would not have a dramatic change when entered.

I started looking at the "how to create a fish tank" tutorial by Allan. The tutorial is useful but I'm having a bit of trouble on the fish appearing. All our team is waiting on now is the building and furniture to be textured and imported into Crysis so we can place it on our modified terrain.

Reference:

Source: Kitchen View, Momoy, http://www.momoy.com/2008/06/10/inspirational-kitchen-design-from-ewe/, (Date Accessed 12th June 2009)

Final Building Form (Process & Development)

The past few days I have been working on re-modelling the whole building. This process was harder than it seemed, alot of planning went into the placement and function of the rooms, the ramps that circulates around the building starting from the ground level down into the pool level took a while to figure out. As stated before, the model is now resized there was remarks previously on how big the building was before.

The tutors suggested having windows around the exterior of the building, as it will give a visual relationship between the two spaces, and since there will be some sort of scenery I think its more of a reason to do so. As the building is resized smaller, natural lighting then will become an issue, but having windows around the exterior of the building hopefully will light up the ramp corridors and some of the living spaces.

The left building was the old fabrication, the right is the new re-built building, as you can see there is a major size difference.

The wells windows now look similar to the ones shown on the conceptual design pictures, I've also noticed that their drawings don't match up, the location of windows don't match from the different views of each picture. The process of creating a custom window took me a long time to do, I had so many problems the sill and head height which did not work with the numbers I inputted, and also the fact that I have never created families within Revit before.

View of the front of the building, these windows will provide more natural sunlight to the building and also for some rooms will provide a view to the outside environment. Hopefully the ramp corridors gets lit up well during the night.

Back and side view of the building, take note that under the last window, that's where the ground will be, so everything under that point will be underground much like a well.

The model completed with the roof, doors and glass have to be removed from the model, as they are to be added when imported into Sandbox 2.

Ground floor level, you can see around the building it has an offset of walls which are the ramp corridors, main stair way is located on the right, living room and dining area are up top, down below the two rooms are night zones, and kitchen and bathroom to the left.

Top right study room, top and bottom left are night zones (bedrooms) with bathrooms, bottom right is another living area.

This is the pool level, main swimming pool is located in the centre, whilst there a more private swimming pool is located to the top, the left side is a living space, and bottom is a shallow swimming area. Ramp access is located to the left where the double door swings are seen.

3D view of the ramp corridors (wall has been hidden), you can see the windows that hopefully will provide natural sunlight into the interior, and ramp corridor.

The two circles show similarities, the left image is a bit off angle. But whilst in the Crysis game it would look very similar indeed.

Pointing out the ramp corridor spaces and how the windows were used to provide lighting into these dark spaces.

This is a snap I took when I imported the model into sketch up, you could see it looks similar to the conceptual perspective, just that the glass isn't see through, and my model doesn't show the fish tanks,textures and water.