Introduction
REN is an unbulit building which is designed for the competition of World Expo 2010 in Shanghai. It has a unique character with chinese symbol of “People” and it is designed depend on the yin yang – natuaral elements such as water, earth, fire, metal & wood. It is a proposal for a hotel, sports and conference center consisting of two buildings. Two buildings represent two symbolic meaning : Mind & Body.
Landscape & Urban Environment
We generate the main building site and the surrounding urban environment upon which other members can build their parts. Terrain and water was created first, then vegetations and park environment was laid out, and finally the urban elements such as bridges, roads and surrounding buildings were added onto the Ren Building Site. The challenge was that we did not have enough information for the landscape and the surrounding environment. It was difficult to generate 100% accurate details of the building and the landscape. There were significant changes on the urban environment as much detail was added onto the site such as bridges, roads and buildings. Accuracy of scales could be debated, but overall, more realistic and developed building environment had been created for this final map fabrication. After completed the landscape, we have worked on the interactivity into environment involving the movement of cars, people and birds as well as bus stops.
Building & Interior
The building was created in 3dmax, since the model has got too many elements in it, so the model is broken down into around 20 pieces and combined when imported into crysis. Besides, furniture of the building are also imported from 3dmax. The building was adjusted into a smaller scale after the model is puzzled in the map. The materials are created inside sandbox. White materials and glass texture are applied to both the exterior and interior of the building. Other textures are also applied to the interior furniture. The transparency of the building works well with the lightings at night view. We also modelled the slabs in Max and located into the building as storeys in Crysis. And then we designed a bar restuarant at the top floor and a lobby at the ground floor. We put a lot of furniture and allocated in the lobby and top level. Such furniture are created in Max, they are also imported into Crysis and applied texture as well.
Lighting effect
After completion of landscape and building model with textures, we need to generate the atmosphere to the environment by setting up the sky and lighting. We would like to create a realisitic and nature atmosphere to environment so we developed the setting of sky like creating clouds as much as possible and changed its potential setting untill our expectation. We created external lightings with light poles in the landscape which surrounding the adjacent buildings, bridges, roads and paths. We got a challenge that if we make a lot of lights to environment, it caused blinking when we moved the angle of views. However, we cannot fix this problem due to it seems like as a normal defects in Crysis. We also designed to use three lighter color of lights in interior of building in order to represent the different areas of building. It resulted a good lighting effect with building texture.
Navigation
Since our building has 50 levels, thus we designed five elevators allocating at the middle and both wings of the building in order to provide navigation to visitors from ground level to top level. Besides, we designed the teleportation as a connection between environment and building, it allows visitors to rapidly get to inner city and walk through there.
Our Reflection
In this project,we have learnt how to well collaborate with team members simultaneously we encounter a big challenge and more problems in communication and work distribution. In point of fact we think what we experienced in this course that is the truth in real working society, it would involve conflict and incoordination between team members. During the process of our fabrication, “patient & respect” are the best solution which somehow they could settle down the problem and conflict, thus we tried keeping such attitude in a team. Thinking negative, no matter what we did however someone would not appreciate or participate, and the things will be getting worst. Consqeuently, we have been screwed up in solving the problem of incoordination. In positive way, actually we gain a lot when we solved the problem together. Because we have different minds and opinions, we can learn from each other and we tried to filter those opinions and find out the best solution efficiently to get the best work done together. Isn’t this collaboration or the objective in this course be supposed to learn?! Anyway, we are happy with this project outcomes and that’s proved our efforts in this course.
