Benv 2423 - Samuel Whitby

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Detailed Porosity Lens Brief

Commercialism Lens

Todays public spaces are often overly polluted due to a society constantly speeding towards a black hole of commercialism. The Commercialism GPS porosity lens is a study of how branding and marketing can be used as a tool to build a foundation for a deductive logic map to be constructed. The Commercialism GPS also explores how an excess of commercialism, a flood of marketing can virtually blind us and overwhelm us in public spaces.

This is achieved by the attachment of brands to the player character when they enter certain zones that are associated with that brand. By a number of brands being attached to the player it is obvious to see which zones the player has visited.

If the player visits to many zones and acquires to many tokens their vision will be obscured by the orbiting brand icons symbolizing the over saturation of products in public spaces.

Final Tutorial: Creating an interactive holographic effect

Creating the material 3:00

Creating The Flowgraph 6:30

Tutorial Research

Holograms in Crysis

My initial ideas for experiment 2 featured numerous holographic elements, holographic signs and interactive architectures but I couldn’t quite achieve the material effect I was looking for. I thought about using particle effects with geometry together and did a number of tests and experiments but still couldn’t achieve what I was after. After playing with particle effects exhaustively I came to the conclusion that I particle effects were not the definitive answer I was after although they could possibly be used to enhance the hologram with moving transparent particles or using a particle effect to create a projected flat hologram however my tests with this were kind of temperamental.

After concluding it was best to use 3d geometry and creating a material to the use the effect I looked through the all the material shaders and properties for the solution. Luckily one of the shaders is hologram which almost can create the exact effect I was after. This shader has a lot of flexibility with lots of controls in the shader parameters. After lots of experimenting with this type of material I reached the conclusion that there were a few important aspects to this shader.

Material Properties

Glow: There needs to be a glow amount for the material to display.

Diffuse Material: The geometry will display without a diffuse material however it will appear flat and uninteresting; using a material that has lots of contrast will generate the best results.

Shader Parameters

Interference Speed: The speed of the flickering within the material.

Interference Size: The size of the material anomalies.

Interference Contrast: The difference in colour value between the anomalies and the normal areas of the material.

Fresnel Bias: The way the material fades and changes light/glow transparency on close inspection, a higher value will widen the effect.

Fresnel Power: The strength of the light going through the material.

For the tutorial I wanted to demonstrate how this could be used to create an interesting futuristic object within sandbox as well as demonstrate my ability with flow graphs as most of my time spent on experiment 1 and 2 was creating my own flow graphs and effects. Due to my programming background flow graphs aren’t much trouble for me to come up with or to construct.

Hopefully my tutorial teaches and inspires an enthusiastic user to create complex and interactive holographic elements in sandbox2.