Peer Review

The Tutorial

This is my Research Task submission for BENV2423. In this tutorial you will learn how to create a custom sky box, and in this example I am making an entirely white environment. In this tutorial I also explore some of the Time of Day settings which affects the skybox and may give you the results you want for your environment.

PLEASE VIEW IN HD!


TUTORIAL SUBJECT (500 Words):

With technology changing and improving every day, there are plenty of definite gaps in the so-called ‘body of knowledge’ that will no doubt be eventually filled as users become more familiar with the software available to them and begin to find limitations and possibilities that the software presents.

However, because these updates and new versions come out so regularly, there is no way even a single person could know how to use every single tool in a program; there are updated versions so regularly that by the time a person was to understand how to use every tool and know every possibility that the software offers there would already be a new version out that users would have questions about how to use.

This is why there is a great need for users themselves to create tutorials (which had indeed been recognised on sites such as youtube) for things they have figured out about the software. It is much more helpful when users create tutorials because they know more than anyone what other users will be wanting to do with the software, much more than buying a book about the program or typing a question into the ‘help’ menu. This is particularly true with software like the Crysis Wars Sandbox 2 Editor that we have been working with this year.

When working with Sandbox this semester I found a few gaps but the thing I found most difficult and most interesting was how to make a custom skybox and a completely white environment; mostly because I had to deal with several different aspects of the editor to achieve this goal and the end result was very rewarding and interesting to walk around in.

I only found one tutorial on how to make a custom skybox on the internet at this website: http://www.incrysis.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=25675, but it was not all that helpful as it also included downloading 2 or 3 extra programs or plugins to get the right file type, etc. But I figured out that because it is possible to export objects from Sketchup with its textures, that plugin must create the .dds file that Sandbox needs to recognise it as a texture. Then I managed to figure out my own simpler process for creating this file. Then because this was not supposed to be a normal-looking sky and I did not want a horizon line I had to figure out how to get rid of it using the Time of Day settings menu, and I still don’t know how to stop it from going to the default setting each time I open up the environment.

The tutorial I created is easy to understand, though made for intermediate to advanced users because of the work in the file path of the Cysis Wars folder, but because I explained things clearly and relatively slowly I think any type of user would have no trouble with it.

Porosity Video

This is my video for BENV2423 Experiment 2 submission. The video depicts my porosity lens for this project, explored through the use of a completely white environment, like a blank canvas, and also through an installation.

PLEASE VIEW IN HD!

Please view earlier post for Porosity Concept!

Filefront and Google Warehouse Uploads

http://www.filefront.com/17478238/z3333620_Exp2_Levels.zip

http://www.filefront.com/17478243/z3333620_ObjectsExp2.zip

http://www.filefront.com/17478380/z3333620_SketchupModels.zip

Controls:
turn on spawn- k
turn off spawn- l

INSTALLATION MODEL: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=3bd8cee840d2658b55e2bc328da57bb3&result=4

SPAWN BOX MODEL: http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=171fb7f7ce096de655e2bc328da57bb3&result=4

Video Tutorial Ideas and Research

For my video tutorial I will be showing how to make an environment white like I have for my assignment submission.
I had a lot of trouble understanding why simply changing the colour of the sky in the Time of Day option in the editor did not work, and later found that to change the colour of the sky you have to use images of particular size and names. The best site I found about this was http://www.incrysis.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=25675.
However, it talks about downloading a plugin for Photoshop to make the .dds format that is required by Sandbox to use the texture. I had to find a way to save an image from Photoshop as .dds, and I downloaded a plugin for Photoshop to do this and that did not work, after a while Andrew and I discovered that if you simply save it as a .tiff in Photoshop and then the Crysis folder automatically creates the .dds image when you paste this .tiff image in there.
So I had to edit this person's written tutorial to suit my needs and also had to play around with settings in the Time of Day option such as 'Volumetric Fog'.

Appropriate Song Selection for Documentary

These are the songs I narrowed it down to for my documentary:
- Never Know (Jack Johnson)
- The Scientist (Coldplay)
- Clocks (Coldplay)
- Upside Down (Jack Johnson)
- Let Me Take You There (Plain White T's)

And I listened to these with my Porosity Lens in mind and the one that spoke to me most in relation to my concept was Upside Down.

Here are the lyrics for Upside Down by Jack Johnson:

Who's to say
What's impossible
Well they forgot
This world keeps spinning
And with each new day
I can feel a change in everything
And as the surface breaks reflections fade
But in some ways they remain the same
And as my mind begins to spread its wings
There's no stopping curiosity

I want to turn the whole thing upside down
I'll find the things they say just can't be found
I'll share this love I find with everyone
We'll sing and dance to Mother Nature's songs
I don't want this feeling to go away

Who's to say
I can't do everything
Well I can try
And as I roll along I begin to find
Things aren't always just what they seem

I want to turn the whole thing upside down
I'll find the things they say just can't be found
I'll share this love I find with everyone
We'll sing and dance to Mother Nature's songs
This world keeps spinning and there's no time to waste
Well it all keeps spinning spinning round and round and

Upside down
Who's to say what's impossible and can't be found
I don't want this feeling to go away

Please don't go away
Please don't go away
Please don't go away
Is this how it's supposed to be
Is this how it's supposed to be

"Who's to say, what's impossible"
Questions the way we view spaces in society, and refers to Porosity Lens being plausible way to view it
"I can feel a change in everything"
This Porosity Lens may just change the way movement in space is investigated and portrayed
"But in some ways they remain the same"
But in some ways this way of viewing movement is not revolutionary, we are just able to use new technology
"And as my mind begins to spread its wings, There's no stopping curiosity"
Because of technology we must open our minds to new possibilities and new ways of thinking about space and my Porosity Lens
"I want to turn the whole thing upside down"
I am going to turn the way people think about this topic 'upside down'
"I'll find the things they say just can't be found"
My Porosity Lens finds ways to observe and portray movement in space in ways that may seem inappropriate, but I will make it appropriate
"Things aren't always just all they seem"
There is always a new way to look at things, not just the conventional way, and showing the memory of movement as spawned objects looks like it's just objects but it is really movement. It is not what it seems!


Here is a video testing this song with my environment:

Custom Installation

I have now replaced the metal fences from the Sandbox Databases I was using as ramps with my own custom made models from Sketchup, and did the same with the platforms that make the levels in the installation.
This time though I decided that it would be better to be able to see the platforms rather than have to guess where you can and cannot walk, so I made the platforms white with the opacity at 50% so that they are see through and when the result of the Porosity Lens (the spawning) is viewed from above for example, none of the entities are hidden by the installation.
When developing this custom installation and modifying it from the original installation I decided to make it on a much larger scale to allow for more varied experimentation with my Porosity Lens. Here I simply duplicated the small custom installation and made it several (96) times the size as it was originally as this model was quite limiting to the player's movement.





The image above shows the result of the spawning of entities as the properties were set before: colour as black and opacity at 20%. But viewing this in the new scene and with the Custom Installation I decided that it does not have as large an impact as it needs to have, and it could be better if the opacity was not so low.
So, I changed the opacity to 100% and tested this out, and decided that I do not need opacity to show the density of the entities that are being spawned because they are at a random rotation and size, so it shows the density by itself.
This is an image of the result of these changes:



I think these changes I made to the entities being spawned make the contrast much larger between the environment/installation and the Porosity Lens.