Antony Gormley Research

I would like to spawn objects as part of my assignment, and after looking at some of Antony Gormley's work I have decided that I would like to incorporate some of his concepts and the shapes he uses into the objects I will be spawning. I was particularly interested in the APERTURE and FRAMER sculpture series', and his exploration of the body through new kinds of structural complexity.

The FRAMER works refer to the "masses discovered within the total body volume", and use architectural volumes to describe and extend the body.



The aim of the APERTURE works is to "turn the body into an open framework of tetrahedral, cubic, dodecahedral and more complex polygons", and the outer edges of the works seemingly "grasp the air and indicate, in the metaphorical sense, the moment in which a body opens itself to the space around it".



Gormley states: "My work has always explored the body as a place rather than an object", and this is interesting for our experiment brief because I would like to explore how the body moves around a place and explore the ways in which I can use architectural volumes and masses to portray this movement.
I plan to use the types of volumes that Gormley uses in his FRAMER works in particular as the objects that are to be spawned as I (local player) move around the environment. This will be the beginnings of my Porosity Lens.

I have visited many of Antony Gormley's Exhibitions in the UK, including 'Event Horizon', and more recently 'Another Place' which I visited in June this year with my family.


(it was a pretty horrible English day!)

S.W.A.T Analysis

entity:ProximityTrigger (from Turn Light On When Player Gets Close Flowgraph)

Strengths: has lots of inputs and outputs, so can be enabled and disabled and can also enable and disable other parts of the flowgraph and nodes.

Weaknesses: limited in terms of using it to trigger things from far away as it will only work when player is on top of it in the game.

Opportunities: easy to use for things like lights that turn on when you get close to them, or move an entity when you get close to it (really anything to do with being within a certain range of the entity in question).

Threats: good to trigger things with, but if too many are used they might overlap and then the movements might not work as intended originally.

Entity:SpawnArchetype (from Spawn Entity as Local Player Moves Around)

Strengths: can spawn any archetype (and make custom models archetypes to use), has many inputs that relate to properties of the archetype (pos, scale and rot) and has outputs that can be used for when the task of spawning is completed or when it has failed.

Weaknesses: had to download plugin system which meant I had to make a mod and a new level too, have to link quite a few more nodes to specify settings for properties and things like time between each spawning, requires moderate knowledge about flowgraphs and how nodes work together.

Opportunities: this will be a useful node to use for showing where a player has moved by spawning objects according to the player's position, leaving behind a pathway of objects like footprints.

Threats: could potentially go wrong if did not know how to make mod version and levels, a bit complicated to install, a bit complicated to turn custom model into an archetype to get the name to type next to 'archetype' in the node settings.

Entity:EntityPos (from Scale Entity as AI Moves Around It)

Strengths: can easily assign entity by right-clicking for selected entity, many outputs with lots of properties that can be set using other nodes, input 'get' which finds assigned entity's position, good for moving objects/players/AIs.

Weaknesses: needs a lot of extra nodes to link to in order to actually set or use any properties of the entity in some way.

Opportunities: can use this to find player's position in the game and when the flowgraph 'gets' the players position I can use this to assign the spawned object/archetype its position.

Threats: if don't understand the communication enough between nodes this node will be useless because it requires some other nodes in order for the position of the input entity to mean anything in the game.

Three FlowGraph Nodes

Make AI Walk Towards Tag Point and Do Action:
This tutorial is from http://www.veoh.com/search/videos/q/sandbox/offset/40/searchId/9e96e75bb22461d76d60e24aa9dd1b70#watch%3Dv17308205SRsWdN2E (accessed 22/9/10)
Here are some screenshots of the flowgraphs I created. (THIS NODE IS NOT ONE I AM CONSIDERING, IT WAS JUST TO START OFF WITH FLOWGRAPHS SO IS NOT INCLUDED IN MY 3 CHOSEN ONES!, AND WILL NOT BE ANALYSED BY S.W.A.T)
For my action I made the AI walk to the tag point and Salute.
This one was the new AI action flowgraph:

This one was the one that is connected to the AI itself:


This is a screenshot of what the set-up looks like in the editor:


This video shows the result of the flowgraphs together:





Light Turn On When Player Gets Close, and Then Turn Off:
Here is a screenshot of the flowgraph I used for this:
I used the Proximity Trigger so that when the player is close to the light, the light will turn on, and when the player is not close anymore, the light will turn off again after 1 second.



Here is a screenshot of what this set-up looks like in the editor:
I used a custom model for this example as when I was first testing out if the flowgraph was working it was hard to see if the light was turning on because you could only see a small change on the terrain floor.





Spawn Entity as Player Moves Around:

I had to download the plugin system for Crysis to get this node (Entity: SpawnArchetype). The flowgraph shown below depicts the node working so that when the game starts, every 0.05 seconds the position of the local player is checked and a chosen archetype is spawned in the position of the player (in this case I chose bananas).

Here is a video of the results of this flowgraph. I plan on investigating the possibilities of this flowgraph in more detail for the assignment.



Scale Entity as AI Moves Around It:
For this flowgraph I used the Entity:EntityPos node for my flowgraph in particular as this allowed me to use the scale input for scaling the basic entity as the AI moves around. This video shows my progress on testing scaling when working with AIs and entities. I had planned to expand on this and use this particular node in my final assignment. However, I am now planning on spawning objects instead.
I got the flowgraph from this blog in my tutorial group: http://terrencewong2423.blogspot.com/ (thank you!). I am interested in finding out more about this node and how I can use scaling in my assignment.
Here is my flowgraph for this node:

Re-arranging and Investigating Town Hall Model

This is the Town Hall model without the long flat components (I am assuming these are the tracks?) and I like the model this way as it is repetitive and plain, so then I will be able to add my own models to it easily and they will stand out more. I would like to use this model as a sort of 'grid' for how the city I build might be arranged.


This is the Town Hall model untouched, in its original form.

Here I lifted the layers from inside the model and put them above the main frame, and then angled the longest components at 30 degrees to make a strange shape. With the angles I am thinking about testing out making a more Tipi-looking building perhaps, but maybe that would only be created when the player moves towards the components. This might be an interesting thing to continue investigating.
This is what the Town Hall model looks like with all those horizontal components having been moved to above the main frame.
This is just one of the components of the main frame.

This is a shot looking through the main frame, which I found interesting as it shows the shape of the structure to be very repetitive and square, when really we can see from the single component of this main frame above that it is not all that repetitive and contains many different sized rectangles. It is however, a very strong shape.

Investigating AI

After watching a few tutorials on youtube, I can see that it is quite hard to distinguish videos that just make the AI do something using AI points and navigation, and ones that use flow graphs.

Making Terrain

Terrain Ideas

http://image10.webshots.com/11/4/87/60/130448760AoOoHU_ph.jpg
This image I found is interesting as it shows a kind of mountainous range, but it is really made up of a series of valleys, as the mountains are flat on the top. There are also some interesting textures.




http://www.beachwallpapers.in/wallpaper/Sandy-Cay-Caribbean-beach/
I like this landscape as it is quite simple and wont distract from what is the real issue in the video I will make for this assignment. It is also quite limiting though, as it would be quite hard to use the landscape in any way in my research as it would really only be flat land with some texture on it. It is very attractive and simple though.



http://www.wizardnet.com/musgrave/cool2.jpg
This is my favourite of the three landscapes as it combines water and mountains, without using the beach concept. I like how these mountains seem to just appear out of the water and the landscape is very harsh and dynamic.