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.