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.

ReDesigned Environment

Since the grass distracted from the spawning objects, and the environment does not play an important part in my Porosity Lens concept, I decided to change the texture to 'snow' and make the sky white. Changing the colour of the sky proved to be more difficult than expected as there is not a lot of information about it out there, so I am considering using this for my Research Assignment.
I have also realised that it is hard to understand how the installation works when I have made the platforms in it see through using the "cloak" function on them. So I have decided to change this for the custom installation so that people other than me who want to test out the Porosity Lens in my environment can understand where they can and cannot walk on each platform in my installation, but still not distract from what is being spawned and the actual essence of the Porosity Lens.

Here are some images of what my environment looks like when the objects are spawned after I changed the textures:


I think that this white 'canvas' helps to emphasize my Porosity Lens and the result of it.



This is a video depicting the result of my experimentation with a completely white environment (including the sky) in order to portray my Porosity Lens more clearly.

Developing Porosity Lens and Sketch Installation

Here I have changed the colour of the archetype object I am spawning so that it is not the same as the sketch installation. This will make it stand out better from the structure, and I have also set the opacity of the archetype to 20% so that it is more obvious when the player has stayed in one place for a long time as the density of the objects will be greater.
However I have noticed that it is quite difficult to see the spawned archetype because the grass distracts your eye.

Sketch Installation

Ideas on Sketch Installation:
- it could be like a platform for the local player to run around on and just be simply 'used' to demonstrate my porosity lens
- it could be an obstacle course with different pathways that could be taken so that perhaps there are choices that can be made by the local player and the spawning will never be the same twice
- it could be the obstacles
- it could be both just a platform for demonstrating the porosity lens and also partly obstacle and visually pleasing (or perhaps purposely visually not-pleasing)
- could create an enclosed environment, therefore limiting the local player's movement, but also allowing the porosity lens to be examined in another way

The sketch installation is made completely from a slightly modified version of this part of the required Town Hall model and is repeated to create the installation.

This is the original version of the part of the Town Hall model.


This is the slightly modified version. I took off the part sticking out from the left side and I copied the top bar to the bottom to make more of a box shape. This is the beginning of my installation.





I have now added ramps using elements I found in the Props folder of the Sandbox2 databases, and also added platforms to make levels in my installation, but so that it does not distract from the objects being spawned and my Porosity Lens itself, I have activated the "cloak" function so that they are invisible. I have left the ramps visible however as I think it is important to be able to see the elements that cause certain patterns in the spawning of objects in my environment.







This video depicts my sketch installation to show what it looks like when the local player moves around inside it and uses it as a platform for spawning objects but also limits the player's movement significantly.



This video shows the local player walking around the environment again but this time you can see the player as he moves which helps the viewer to understand the way the spawning is working in the environment and view what is happening from more of a third person view rather than being the player and seeing it first hand as the player.

Mastered Flowgraph Node

The node that I have been working with most this semester is the Entity: SpawnArchetype (among others that are needed to work certain functions of this node. I have added my custom model as the archetype and modified the flowgraph to make a key trigger whether the archetype is spawning or not (by spawning them somewhere that cannot be seen). This video shows mastery of the spawn node because it shows that I understand how the node works as I have set properties like scale and rotation to my specifications, and added a way of turning the spawning on and off.

Progress with Spawn Archetype Node

Here I have added my custom made object as the archetype and tested out how the flowgraph is working with this new addition:

Porosity Lens

I found reviewing Antony Gormley's works and his concepts increasingly intriguing (and relevant to my investigation into Porosity) as I dove further into it, as he has spent the last 25 years investigating "the body as a place of memory and transformation". This got me thinking that if the body stores memory, then surely the best way to investigate the interaction between body and place is to somehow 'store' this information by leaving behind a trace of the movement of the body, and therefore transforming the 'place'.

"Spawn" supposedly means "an operating function that executes a child process", and when looking up the term "Lens" I found a meaning that, like in the case of 'spawn', has a significant (yet entirely metaphorical) connection with this experiment; this being the use of the "Corrective Lens" which is for "the correction of human vision". I see a strong link here to my Porosity Lens, in that when the local player moves around the environment and these "children" are spawned it creates a new way of understanding how a person moves through an environment; not just by seeing them move through it and watching them slow at certain junctions, but viewing the 'results' of this as an object itself with a property such as density showing the types of movement that occurred. Viewing this movement as an object also relates back to Gormley's work in an interesting way as he explores the body as a place rather than an object and I plan to explore how the body moves around a place and use objects to portray this movement.


References:
http://www.russelllowe.com/benv2423_2010/experiment2/brief/brief_exp2.htm
http://www.whitecube.com/artists/gormley/(quote above about Antony Gormley's work from this site)
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/spawn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lens

Porosity (Lecture Stuff)

Can Porosity be represented in real time? What should a representation look like?

"the public space of the city doesn't end at the building envelope; any mixed building requires access by the public and is necessarily prous."

The porousness of a building relates to the ease by which a building might be accessed and evacuated; the irony here is that high levels of porousness would seem to facilitate both.

In video games we are not restricted by materiality, translucent, overlaying is more opaque, a hybrid of the additive and subtractive methods: what it should look like.

Research for Research Assignment

3D Ripper DX:

I would like to use this plugin for the research assignment to try and somehow 'save' the objects/scenes I create while in the game in Crysis, as when you press esc it is all gone. This plugin is compatible with 3DS Max 2009 and 3DS Max [Design] 2010, 2011. For this I will need to use 3DS Max Design of some kind as it seems that I cannot get the file for 3DS Max 2009 anymore.

Supposedly 3D Ripper DX will allow me to:

- capture all geometry, textures and shaders, rendered during single frame

- import captured geometry into 3D Studio Max

- see what exactly has been drawn by each individual draw call

- see renderstate, textures, vertex streams, index stream, vertex declaration, vertex and pixel shaders (including HLSL source code if available) of each individual draw call

I will be keeping an eye on the forum for this program also, hopefully there will be someone trying to use this program with Crysis or something similar, as I am not sure that it will even work with this program!

http://www.deep-shadows.com/hax/3DRipperDX.htm

Ideas for Experiment 2 and Porosity

Originally, my idea was going to be about creating an environment according to how the local player acts and moves around. My idea was that I would make a grid or flat boxes and I would walk around on them in the game, and the longer I stood on them, the less they would scale. So, if I was to run around fast across the boxes they would grow really tall because I hardly spent any time standing on them. This would investigate Porosity according to public and private space. The areas a run over fast and do not linger become/are shown as private space, non-accessible, unwelcoming. The areas I spent a long time in (the accessible areas) would then form a pathway through the 'city' and would perhaps be defined as pubic and 1-hour spaces, like Richard Goodwin is exploring.


After running this idea past tutor Andrew Wallace, however, we decided that it was not a good idea to have an environment that changes in the game, as if I ran through this and boxes shot up on the y-axis because I did not stand on them, then no other player/AI would be able to contribute to the shaping of the environment, so this idea was really very limiting.

I am now experimenting with Spawning objects that I custom make in Sketchup (that are similar to shapes that Antony Gormley uses in the works in the post below), that will hopefully each have a random rotation and random scaling on each axis. When I am in a place for a long time, more will spawn so the density will increase, and this will be shown easily as the objects will have a certain transparency to them. I am also planning on investigating the program 3D Ripper DX, which should allow me to save/capture the shape made by the local player as I move around the environment. This video shows the beginnings of this but using a clock (from Archetype Entities, Props in the editor):



These are the models I have been working on that were inspired by Antony Gormleys sculpture series' Framer and Aperture: