Week_04 and Week_05- Movie trailers and Direction

Trailers:
1) Inception
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66TuSJo4dZM
With Inception, I quite liked the use of dynamic music as well as actions shots employed in it. The scenes the trailer faded out to black to give the viewer an idea of the successive sequence of events straight after one another, and effectively engages the audience.

2) Perks of being a wallflower
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5rh7O4IDc0
 The pacing of this trailer, I really liked, with it starting off slowly and simply, then escalating into a dramatic an dynamic climax that engages the audience. The use of text to narrate parts of the story also gives it a story book feeling (being adapted from a novel, it seems fitting enough). I love the pacing in this as well as the change in atmosphere it brings to the viewer

3) Alice in Wonderland Trailer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9POCgSRVvf0
The pacing of this trailer is very dynamic and changes all throughout the trailer to create a sense of urgency and grabs the attention of the audience very well. With the quick succession of scenes and music, it creates a high paced atmosphere



Problems:
Some problems I have encountered while modelling would be the Rayfire plugin. The plugin itself wont install properly on my computer, nor will int install on the lab computers. Because of the nature of the task there are also many cry engine plugins for all the programs, such as Photoshop and for 3ds max, and it is such a hassle to keep placing them in the lab computers. Having everything setup on my computer, I was set to have Rayfire work and install on my laptop- however, none of the plugins i downloaded for ray fire worked, which was very annoying, I have yet to find an alternative to Ray fire but I would prefer if I had ray fire to assist me.


Direction 
My direction for the assignment consists of cracking the concrete and making part of the roof fall down due to the weak steel beam underside of the main canopy of the Barcelona Pavilion. I am also considering making the pond area of the pavilion to have moss and vegetation growing on it due to the moist temperatures of the forest area that I have placed the building on.

The pavilion comprises of mainly concrete and marble, and I have been considering the way they creep and crack under heat as well as their weak tensile strength. Thus, many of the concrete walls will crack and fail under heat, gravity and dead weight. The glass will most definitely shatter and break, so it does not need to be considered that much in the scheme of things.

Moss will also grow on the marble and concrete, like vines crawling up the side of a building or something. The will add to the sense of age and decay of the building as well as illustrates the passing of time and the effects of nature taking over the man made structures.

EXP2 Final

Cry Engine Video Trailer
http://youtu.be/fcOQqan_EvM

http://www.mediafire.com/download/lrw9wdwchqap3of/Nguyen_Sally_Arch1390_Assignment2.zip

Afterthoughts
This experiment was very interesting indeed, with the destruction of buildings instead of building them. It was a very veyry tough assignment for me due program failure such as Ray fire not being workable for me. As an alternative I had used the Procutter tool that was found in the 3DSmax program. It was a more strenuous and tedious task that I absolutely hated, but it was the next best (and free) alternative to Rayfire. It was hard but in the end it came out successfully and as I wanted the buildings and concrete to crack.
The next problem I had with the assignment was the number of plugins we had to copy and paste into the different files and different programs. The photoshop method of making the spec, bump and diff maps was tedious at best, but the Crazy Bump app was most interesting for me. It was very very interesting as well as the fact that I could see the 2d texture I applied came alive and became 3d withing seconds. It was very very intresting to use
The final problem I had with the assignment was the grouping of materials and the location of the 3ds max exported object. It was very very annoying linking all the textures to the diff, spec and ddn files for each materilal for the exported object in cry engine. It was very very annoying and I am glad that it, in the end, was figured out and didnt show my first error of lost and glowing materials.

Week_03- Forensic Architecture

This lesson was very hands on for me, with the drawing exercise. It was a very interesting lesson, and I explored the properties of different materials in the Barcelona Pavilion as well as the many ways that each material could fail over time. The drawing exercise helped me to visualise what exactly in the structure would fail and or decay, and really helped with the visualisation process.

Progress shots and concerns

The problem I have faced in the modelling process would be the glowing textures. I have tried exporting the clean materials of the 3dsMax Barcelona Pavilion into the cry engine level, but it keeps glowing and I have yet to find a solution to it. I have applied bump and specular maps to the objects for good practice, albeit for the ones that actually appear. I plan to figure this out once I try Rayfire on my construction and geometry, but hopefully by the end I will be able to import the cry textures successfully.

Week_02 Materials

 Before and after application of bump maps to my building

1.       Concrete

·         Coarse granular material, aggregate particles, glue together

·         Used twice as much as steel in buildings

·         Aggregate: Mixed with coarse gravel, crushed rocks ie limestone or granite along with sand

·         Cement: binds the aggregate

·         Water mixed with dry composite, makes a semi liquid mix, solidifies and bonds other components together

·         Has a high compressive strength, low tensile strength and thus needs to be reinforced with materials with high tensile strength, like steel.

·         Elasticity is constant at low stress levels,  it shrinks as it matures, and it cracks due to shrinkage and tension

·         Long duration forces on concrete make sit prone to creep (deformation)

·         Expansion, corrosion, freezing of trapped water, fire or radiant heart effect the structure and the concrete.  Reinforcement bars can also crack the cement due to expansion with heat pushing the cement outwards

2.       Glass

·         Made by melting sand, soda ash, dolomite and limestone together,

·         Mix raw materials into a batch, melting furnace, molten glass at 1550 degrees Celsius

·         Float baths, 1100 degrees Celsius, makes a flat sheet of glass,

·         Cooling room 600 degrees C

·         Enters washing machine at 70 degrees c, then is cut to size

·         recyclable,

·         prone to shattering and cracking if enough force is applied, and

3.       Steel

·         Carbon and iron alloy

·         Iron is smelted from its ore in commercial processes, and the liquid is continually cast into long slabs or ingots, then heated in a soaking pit and hot rolled into slabs, blooms or billets (poles, rods, wire)

·         Used in construction of roads, railways, other infrastructure, appliances and buildings.

·         Long steel is used as reinforcing bars and mesh in reinforced concrete

·         If subjected to intense hear, reinforcing steel bars in concrete can expand and crack the concrete

·         Steel is prone to rust if subjected to sunlight and salt attack, water and oxygen

4.       Marble

·         Is a non foliated metamorphic rock composed of recrystallised carbonate minerals, Is metamorphosed limestone

·         Artificial marble is made by combining marble dust and cement or synthetic resins to make “cultured” marble and faux marbling

·         Weather has a degrading effect on it:

·         Rain water, with the help of atmospheric gases results in dissolution of marble and creates salt movement in  the microstructure

·         Polishing and detail is lost when weathered, not smooth and crisp edges are lost

·         Low temperatures cause freeze thaw properties and stresses the material

·         It deteriorates due to weathering, but is extremely durable so it doesn’t allow absorption of a lot of water, is highly reactive when exposed to acids or even mildly acidic rain water

·         The pores of marble allows greater dissolution than typical round pores, and is coupled with marble’s inherent soluability 

This lesson saw the use of diffuse, specular and bump maps to apply to our building. It was a bit tedious with the changing between layers and the placement of the plugin of the cry engine tiff into the right folder was annoying. Crazy bump was very easy to use and it was interesting to see the texture become 3d on the program. It is an interesting tool and i plan to make very interesting textures with it in the future

Week_01 3DsMax and Cry Engine

Barcelona Pavilion

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Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

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German pavilion in the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona Spain

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Simple forms

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Marble, red onyx and travertine

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Continuous space, inside and outside blended

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Distinction between structure and enclosure, a regular gird of cruciform steel columns interspersed by freely-spaced planes

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Building rests on a plinth of travertine

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Large water basin

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Chrome clad cruciform columns, gives a hovering effect, “seems to be struggling to hold the roof up”

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Walls directed movement of the person through different, non-linear paths

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Exotic materials used, plates of high grade stone iemarble veneers and golden onyx and gret tinted glass used as spatial dividers

House at Bordeaux

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Had been designed for a family of parents and three children

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Client Jean Francious Lemoine was paralysed, and an elevator was constructed, combines two parallels together

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Surrounded by an English style park

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Building is composed of three houses superimposed over the other: three floors, the lowest is dug into the rocky hillside and is in several caves

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Composed of cement, glass and aluminium, and creates structural ambiguity

The Rudin House

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Herzon and de Meuron

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Invokes childhood memories of a doll house, contains elements of a traditional house

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Heavy reinforced concrete, held up by thin pillars seemingly to create a floating effect

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Has a large deck, large windows that open outwards

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Shape of the roof, material finishing is cloth asphalt

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House is symmetrical lengthwise, a ladder leads from the underside of the house into the building

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House stands on concrete stroke linear and will ideal, but it contains a side terrace with some classical and vulgar pots suspending railings

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Defined as a monolithic construction that allows connection with nature, as is observed as the water covers the walls and not worn pr damaged material from the walls

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Contains mainly concrete

 Progress of my model in 3ds Max

In this lesson, we explored how to import a 3ds max model into the cryengine environment. It was very annoying getting the right plug-ins into the right folders, and I had 3dsMax 2013, so I had to re-download the 2012 version so that the plug-in would work. After doing this, I had to tediously put in each block of the design in 3dsMax using the box tool.

I decided to do the Barcelona pavilion- I had decided to do the pavilion from the beginning due to it’s interesting material choice as well as it’s decaying potential. Early ideas of mine include the shallow pool area becoming a swampy march due to the humid climate of my Cry-Engine environment in EXP1 as well as the overgrowth of trees penetrating the site. Because design of the Pavilion aimed to blend the interior and exterior together with the open design of the building, I could literally integrate natural elements with the structural and manmade aspects of the mainly marble structure. Decaying of marble as well as glass of the windows would be an interesting thing to analyse and produce in Cry Engine for EXP2.