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.

We have tried to import the map into the game, however there are quite a lot  of problem exist like all the solids like stairs and signs we have created are gone, the terrain is grey in color instead of green, some surrounded buildings disappear, The problem could not be fixed so we might have to demonstrate our map in Sandbox instead.

The building becomes the Chinese sign for ‘The People’, and a recognizable landmark for the World Expo in China.

The REN Building is a proposal for a hotel, sports and conference center for the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai.The building takes its form from the Chinese character for person  and combines two buildings (one symbolic of mind and the other symbolic of body). The shape of the building reflects on the yin yang -natural elements water,earth etc and the Chinese symbol for people, all the information has been put together to create the ending finish.

Working from our previous map fabrication there were some issues that needed to be address before final fabrication. We continued straight from our previous work and discussed our key problems.

Recap on what needed to be addressed-

Not enough people in and surrounding the building

Needed more surrounding buildings

Fixing elevator access to floors

Texture of surrounding buildings

Not enough interior in Ren building (not enough furniture)

Texture of furniture and floor/walls

Lightening inside building

Flight of Stairs needed to second floor

We as a team believe we have addressed all these issues, we tried to create the surrounding environment which was urban and lively as we did not have enough information on how  exactly the surrounding environment would look like but believe we’ve managed to portray an urban feel quite well.

Our main focus was getting in more AI into building and other imported city objects. Once this was done we worked on the texturing of the surrounding buildings and interior. We found it was important since the size of our building to get a full view you need to view from long distance therefore needed a more dramatic city life surrounding, we concluded to add more buildings. Our end result a more dense looking city which is closer to the Ren building- which now does not look out of place.

We concentrated on fixing small errors of the Ren building which had gaps in between walls, the elevator was another main issue which was a time consuming effort. As we needed the elevator to stop at different floors and has the option to up or down to any floor.

We incorporated our specializations as much as we could as well as other group member’s topics. Our final video will show all our efforts and corrections we have made.

The Ren building has a unique design and as a team we believe overall it was great to research and model this design it has been interesting and was a great challenge.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=G2AGR56B

During studio time, we have walk through the map in crysis and discussed with the tutors. In the coming weeks before the final presentation and submission, there are serveral things that we need to consider:
- Since we have failed in combining the two maps, interativity may need to be re-done by next week
- Roads in the map, some elements of the model are dislocated which need to be fixed.
- Interior space: except teleportation, AI should be able to walk through the space physically
- Lift stopping at each levels if possible

I’ve done the textures for the surrounding buildings. I will send the files to Wing now through email. Good luck with your exams/assessments

Jae.

We talked with Jeremy and Graham about our progress and specialisation.  We told them about our plan that AI will add again into landscape, the street lighting and texture of interior will be modified as well. They gave us a lot of advises how to make our specialisation much better.

During studio, each of us has discussed about our specialization with Jeremy and Graham, on how to approah our different difficulty of the specialization.
Referring to our project, since the interativity has been saved in a different map instead of the map with the lighting and model in it, we will have to try to combine the maps for this week.

Teresa – Advanced Player Movement (Teleportation, flying, etc.)

Wing – Advanced Elevators (Movers, Escalators, etc.)

Monice – Interactivity with In-game Objects