Sunday Meeting

Its very important to have group meetings now since its getting close to the submisison date. Today our group divided up all the work, so in a few days time we can collects each individuals work and combine it into one. Jackey is working on the land form, we need to make a few adjustments to the land, making it look and feel more like an desert oasis. Wirada and Swati looked into themes and furniture designs we could have for our rooms inside the building, one major problem I thought we had was that the furniture's textures didn't quite match up with the room, a suitable theme would definitely be recommended. Myself, after having feedback from the tutors I now made some major adjustments, first of all the overall building was too large, so the building is now scaled down into a more workable realistic size.

In the previous fabrication our building didn't have the ramp section which runs along the walls of the building, windows were suggested to be put in to create a better sense of a relaxing peaceful place and also have a visual connection to the external environment, before it just looked like a box with double doors. Windows are now vital to the building, as the well hole is now smaller it will probably not provide much natural sunlight for the interior spaces, therefore windows are now placed around the building, this also helps to light up the ramp spaces and some of the interior rooms. Basically we are re-creating the whole fabrication again from scratch, at least now we know the process of importing it into Crysis as it was done before.

Week 12

Russell Lowe was speaking to us during the lecture today. He showed us some of his projects in which he used Crysis, he describes the Crysis engine to be amazing, as in previous years he has been working mostly with the unreal engines, which he still thinks is great, but not as great and powerful as Crysis.

Real-time visualisation gives clients a better feel of their environment, having this you can find errors which you might not see on the plans, e.g. the elevator type lift that lifts heavy patients collided with the door opening. These errors probably will not be noticed if it wasn't for the real time environment, and may have caused major problems when the building is completed.

Stephen Peter then gave us a brief introduction on next semesters graduation project, he gave out a couple of examples to give us ideas on the decisions we can make, at this point of time I think ill be going with either time-based visualisation or just visualisation.

During the tutorial our team received feedback from Jeremy and Graham. Personally I think we need to change alot of things, building scale, materials, textures, lightings, landscape, and some other minor problems such as the doors not appearing when you first enter the game. The feedback was very helpful as advice is given to us, but weather we take it in is entirely up to us. Whilst I was modelling the building I noticed that the exterior of the building had no windows, it just looked like a block with doors, Jeremy advised us to maybe put windows in there to make the building more appealling to the eye and actually give it a feel of wanting to go inside. I totally agree with that suggestion, the outside landscape has some greenery which residents can enjoy the view, so why not have windows to have a visual relationship to the external environment. This week is really going to be full on.

Mid‐Level Specialisation - Creating a Custom HUD

Personally I think this tutorial is useful, its the only video tutorial I found on how to create a custom HUD for Crysis. My personal experience of trying to complete this tutorial failed, at first everything was going well it was easy to follow his guide, but when it hit 1min 20secs into the video, he just flys through all these things, and doesn't talk about he done it, (think that part was fast forwarded). Only had 4 minutes left untill the tutorial could of been done. I skimmed towards the end of the video and noticed I was going to have another problem at 4min 58sec, he had like a quick launch MOD in game shortcut happening, in which I had no glue how to get to.




Above: Where I was left behind.

Reference:

Source: Tutorial Video, youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol6iOrMCvgU, (Date Accessed 30th May 2009)

Week 11

Today we visited iCinema, which is located towards the upper campus of UNSW. Matthew McGinity guided us through into the cinema where we were guided into a room surrounded by projected screens 360 degrees around. The place is made up multiple cameras each projecting on the the screen. 3D glasses were provided to us to have the full experience of iCinema, firstly we were showed ancient sites, such as Angkor Wat, and other temples and sites, this experience was amazing especially the part when they had the Indian god Shiva dancing, you could tell its computer animated but it really feels as if you are standing a meter away from it. Next we were in a mine, this mine was to provide training for new miners about the hazards in the mine, and what precautions should be taken in a state of an emergency, I really think this is a great way to teach lessons to miners, as it is probably as real as it can get visually.


The tutorial this week was short, just had a discussion on what was going to be happening in the following weeks, and what should be done, and what we should be prepared for. During this week we should be creating our second tutorial which is the "medium difficulty", also apply it to our fabrication and add two others from people of other groups.

Reference:

Source: iCenema, Sydney Festival, http://2008.sydneyfestival.org.au/events/icinema_centre_unsw/icinema_centre_unsw.htm, (Date Accessed 29th May 2009)

Creating a HUD

I was further researching into how to create a HUD, I came across this great, but difficult (for me) tutorial. Previously I stressed the point that I'm no good when it comes to Flash and C++. I attempted this second tutorial really thinking that I was going to nail it this time, but somewhere along the tutorial their instructions became misleading to me, and things just didn't happen to work, also I still dont have the Mods folder within th Crysis Folder.

Above: A rough idea of what the HUD could look like

This tutorial Creating a HUD is really useful and I'm pretty sure it will work, apparently its rated easy, but once again unfortunately for me it wasn't so easy as they say, more time is needed for me to finish this tutorial, time which I don't have due to the load of work to be done to my teams final fabrication. I thought about writting up a tutorial, but there isn't really much point, as it will just be re-worded by myself. This tutorial has enough information to get you through, and I believe that its possible to complete with more time given.

Beginner Level Specialisation (is a no go for me)

This is a tutorial I found which the outcome of it is having a display of your liking on the Crysis HUD. Before attempting this tutorial I think it is highly recommended that you have some knowledge on how to use Adobe Flash, the tutorial uses Flash CS3, I used CS4 and another thing to point out is that I have never used Flash before. Whilst "trying" my best to complete this tutorial it was minor things that let me down, also you will need to know a bit of C++.





Everything went smoothly until here, I couldn't find the Hud.h which was supposedly located in the GameDll project, under the HUD folder, which did not appear in my folder Crysis.

For those who are willing to try it the link below will lead you to the pdf of the tutorial.
http://crymod.com/thread.php?threadid=21294&hilight=hud+tutorial
Good luck, I 100% sure that this can be done, but unfortunately for me it cannot be.

Week 10

Today's guest speaker was Andrew Wallace who was a recent FBE graduate now working for Lara Caldea Architects. Andrew specialises in creating architectural models in real-time engines, he has worked with the unreal engine and also the crysis engine. Using real-time environments is very time consuming but can show the clients great detail on their project's development and also rack in alot of cash. LCA entered a few competitions which they submitted real-time environments, I'm really impressed with the one they submitted on Sydney harbour, the detail of the environment was just amazing, real-time is truly another experience especially for clients to see, just mind blowing.

Below: LCA's design for the children, made with the Crysis engine

Below: LCA's Eco house design in the Crysis Engine

During the tutorial our group (which only was Jackey and I) wanted to test if our fabrication worked inside the game mode of Crysis, but unfortunately this test couldn't be completed as all the XPS laptops were taken. I discussed with Graham my field of specialisation which is the heads up display for Crysis, I realised that its not about getting the HUD to show what you want, its all about the method of doing it, cause if you know the method then endless possibilities are open to you.

Reference:

Source: Design for children video, LCA Architecture Design, http://www.laracalderarchitect.com.au/index.html, (Date Accessed 25th May 2009)

Source: Eco Design House, ARCH1392 Blog, http://arch1392-2009.blogspot.com/, (Date Accessed 25th May 2009)