Crysis Week14 Ex-Final Post

Week 14 Final Hydropolis – Reflection

Our Goal:

Our Initial goal was to create The Hydropolis Underwater Hotel as close as possible to the original design.

What we achieved:

Because of the lack of information for the Hydropolis, we managed to create the interiors and exteriors of th Hydropolis island based on our understanding of the architeture. Large amount of design couldn't be solved due to our level of sandbox editing skills. But the final fabrication does resemble 80% of the original design with 1:1 scale real world Dubai environment.

My Contribution to the Project

• Implementing Real world Dubai Google Earth Map into Crysis with added vegetation, buildings and objects

• Create AI People, AI-cars, AI-boats, AI-Vehicle

• Create Underwater Hydropolis Lighting

• Create Night time Hydropolis Lighting

• Create Custom Dubai Mainland buildings

• Create Custom Minimap

• Create Spawn Point

Team Collaboration

Team Structure:

Allan (Team Leader & Main Hydropolis Island Modeller)

Stephen (AI, Underwater Lighting, Minimap, Custom Building Modelling, and Dubai Environment Modelling)

Philip (Custom Hydropolis Shell Modelling in GC)

Eva (Underwater room interior modelling)

For team collaboration, each team were assigned to their part of project fabrication which was informed by our team blog. the difference between our team and other teams was that the way we using sandbox editor. Unlike other teams who fabricate everything in one single crysis layer file, we used multiple layers to fabricate ours. The reason for using this method was because our team couldn’t meet up as often as other teams and as we are on a tight time schedule. So everyone in our team was assigned to their part of fabrication tasks and was merged together later. There were many benefits of using multiple layers. One was that team members don’t need to wait for others to finish their part in order to do their part of work which saves time; by exporting parts of our crysis map as layers, we limited the risk of losing objects and fabrications in sandbox 2 editor to minimum. Another benefit was improved time management on project phases.

Conflicts

We did encount some conflict during team collaboration phases, mainly due to the differences of skills and technology levels of each team members. Some team member wasn't capable of doing their part of fabrication at expected quality which resulted in redoing the same project fabrication multiple time.

Problems encounted

• AI Path
  Causing Sandbox Editor to crash whenever tried to draw AI Path in sandbox 2

• Final Presentation error
  AI character changed from female scientist to male soldier during the Final Presentation. Maybe was because of the map been reset to default in the new computer

• Some team member didn’t save fabrication as layer and did lose the objects within the map
  

Problems solved

• Import Sketchup Buildings to crysis
  I couldn't import the custom made sketchup building into crysis for the first 8 weeks of the course until i realised that i need to ungroup all the buildings for them to be converted to .cgf format.
  
  

Problems Unable to Solve

• I was trying to make a game start cutscene for our Hydropolis map. But couldn't make vtol or helicopter to take off from custom made building top or on crysis solids. Vtol or helicopter will simply sink down and explode.

• Under water room textrues are affected by the ocean lighting outside
  
  

Final Thought

It was a great experience for learning crysis sandbox as a way of architectural realtime visualisation. Yes, although we did have many problems throughout the whole fabrication process, not everyone in the team were from the same culture background, and not everyone in the team can finish their part at expected quality, i have to say that we did do hell of work and achieved what we expected in the beginning. It was a learning experience not only for architectural study but also for coping with different people in the society.


References:

Dubai Sketchup Building Original:

Courtesy of
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=9d45e4ca8d6b552daa8a1830375d237c&prevstart=24


Custom Textures
Courtesy of
http://www.cgtextures.com