Contribution of project

My contribution to this fabrication:
- Modelling the Ren Building
- importing objects outside crysis such as model itself, furniture etc.
-creating texture and materials for Ren
-re-modelling for access from ground floor to the top floor.
-creating teleporter
-Building’s interior
-Presentation room in fabrication
-map exporting to game
-Materials for presentation (slides, images, video)

The main role for me in this project is to model the unbuilt architecture that we have chosen in the early weeks of this session. I also deal with creating materials inside the editor. Since we have very limited information about this building that it does not even have an exact site to sit on and it’s dimension and size, I had a lot of trouble modelling it by just looking at a few pictures of the original design, following the placement of those circle facades and put them together one by one. It is really time consuming to do it but I think I ended up  getting a quite nice building in crysis collaborating with the site created and the lighting effects. During the process of doing the fabrication we did have some problems collaborating together, I think this is what happens in the society as well working with different people, but we have get done with the project at the end .

Final Model

After working with Wing for almost a week, finally the fabrication is done! Though we have to stay at uni overnights to work on the map, I think it worths.
I think it’s still not perfect enough since we didn’t have enough time to work on a lots of things like textures, lighting, adding stuff on other levels, but I am still quite happy with what we did.
Now it’s 3 hours away from my flight, I hope the presentation will go fine tomorrow.

Importing game trouble

When all the things are almost done, I have tried to import the map into the game again and quite a lot of problems exist! first, The terrain appears as grey in color but not green, then the solids created didn’t work in the game as well such as the stairs and the signs…so the walk through presentation may need to do in Sandbox inside.

Adding panels

Panels are prepared  for the presentation room in the fabrication. I have tried several times putting the panel onto a solid in crysis, to see if the quality of the panel is good enough and whether the words on the panel is readable. Have  created the panel almost 3 times bigger than the .dd size (1024*1024)

Presentation room in fabrication

After doing the panel Wing and I started recording scene from the map to prepare for the video and trailer. The submitted videos capture mainly the landscape, interativity, exterior and interior of The Ren building.

Teleportation in map

The teleportation is now added to the map, which the AI can teleport between the inner city and The Ren building. One problem I had when I re-open the map is that the teleporter doesn’t work unless I go to the flowgraph and open the teleportation flowgraph I created manually. I have already saved the .xml in the Entities to make it load itself once the map is in Game mode but it’s still not loading, so i have copy and pasted the flowgraph in one of the existing flowgraph that will load automatically when the map is open.
The video show the AI transfer from the city to the Ren and back into the inner city by stepping on the teleport platform.

Ground Floor renovation

Lobby - Before

Lobby - After

Connection floor to the elevator - Before

Connection floor to the elevator - After

The ground floor (lobby and M-floor) is fixed now by editing the element in 3ds max and re-import into crysis. The stairs was created in crysis by using solid. I have did twice for the stairs. First time I did it by just drawing a random cube and rescaling it. However I found out that the AI couldn’t step on the stairs, it’s not solid, even I have applied the materials on them. After testing for  few more times, I discovered that once the solid is rescaled, it will become transparent…you can still see the stairs but in game mode, the AI will just pass through the it instead of stepping on it. So I have removed all of the stairs and re-draw them.
Now the AI can walk through the whole building from the entrance to the top floor. I have tried to put the slab on the exact place so the AI could walk out of the elevator instead of jumping out, but got some reason it has to jump out, even the slab has placed on the same height as the lift.

Glass - Before

Glass - after

The opacity of the glass as also been edited. Since the opacity is too low before and it looks like there’s nothing between the exterior and the interior space. I have made the diffuse color blue and make the opacity to 99, and it didn’t make any change….So I have create a .dds file (a blue background 128 x 128 pixel) and applied it to the glass, thsi time it works, the new glass is not “visible”.

Fixing up errors

So I have continue working with Wing to fix some other problems today after she has done her elevator.
some minor problems are the AIs are positioned outside the building on the top floor so when I go to game mode, they fall down and die…so I’ve relocated them,probably is because I didn’t place the building to the exact place as before? and birds are flying in the building…
some cars are floating in the air so I’ve got it fixed as well.

One other problem that has not been fixed is the road next to the Ren building. The road just stop at a point and not connecting to another road or to the building. Since Jae has left Sydney already so Wing and I were trying our best to fix it since we both are not too familier with the landscape editing. We have put fences there to try make it looks better..may be?  The roads are still overlapping but we’ll leave it and see if we have got time to merge the roads in a better way.

When Wing was creating her elevator, she found that it’s really hard to get the elevator stop on the level accurately so the AI can walk out of the elevator, so I have go back to 3dsmax, and break the  ren building into more smaller parts, like the columns to hold the elevator (seperate it into 5 pieces as there are 5 columns), levelling (save the floor slab one by one), as well as editing the ground floor as we may need to add stairs and let AI walk to the elevator physically instead of using a teleporter.

building dislocated

After the exam for another subject, I met up with Wing to start working on the map.
As in the studio, we discovered that the building elements are not joint together properly, so I have re-import the building elements, and give them the same point(X,Y,Z), so for every element I can just type in the same number for them.

errors like floor slabs are not joints together, textures need to be fixed as well.
I may have to finish putting the elements together so that Wing can work on the elevator.

Map with Interactivity

So today we have got the map with Monica’s interactivity in it. So we can continue working on the details of our project.
Since Jae is leaving on next Monday, he has  fix the texture of the surrounded building first. I will work on fixing the “error” of the Ren building, and break the model down into more pieces for easy editing in crysis, and Wing will edit the elevator after the model is done.
Videos and slides for presentation will be prepared after the map is edited.

Teleport with message

I have create a video showing that when an avatar teleport to another place, an overlayed message will appear and tells where the avatar has teleported to. The flowgraph also allows to set the duration of the message appear on screen, the color of the text, as well as the position of the message on the screen such as message appearing on top rigth hand corner of the screen in game mode.

The tutorial is in the class Wiki in the website below:
http://arch1392-collaboration-2009.wetpaint.com/page/Medium+level++Teleportation