The Smart Station Draft

Flowgraph Mastery

Node 1

Node 2

Node 3

Behind The Porosity Lens: Concepts

The Lens

Imagine getting on a train and arriving at an unknown stop. A station located in the middle of no where, impossibly floating in mid air surrounded by clouds. A place imaginable to exist in the near future where the architecture is interactive and dynamic. Buildings that know and understanding how people move through and inhabit its spaces, an enriched interactive experience of dynamic, reflexive and pro active architecture.


My Porosity Lens is one that is created by a complex and futuristic "smart" train station that is located on a floating node, where there is a relationship between information, movement and people that influences the spaces within the station. There is also a presence of information in the sense that the movement of information between elements is visible as well as representations of information are in abundance which effects how people perceive and navigate space. 

Finding artistic, sculptural as well as practical functional dynamic architectures. The sculptural aspects of these reactive architectures will reflect aspects of movement to perform an abstract analysis. The functional elements will have purposeful nature.

The Landscape

The Landscape will be a futurist floating plaza with the Train Station at the centre, floating in amongst clouds in mountainous terrain.

The Architecture

The Architecture will be Futuristic and "High-Tech" that explores the relationships between people, movement and information. The Architecture will feature many dynamic elements, including holographic entities to display an array of information influenced by combinations of place and movement. The dynamic flow of architecture and information will be dependent on and influence how people move through spaces.

Flowgraph S.W.O.T Analysis

Rotate Entity/ Rotate Entity TO

Strengths

Able to Rotate the Entity continuously or from one angle to another.

Weaknesses

Can be difficult to accurately measure the rotation in Euler Angles.

Opportunities

Creating a dynamic reactive architecture that uses complex rotations to emphasis or analyse peoples movements.

Threats

Will need collisions turned off to avoid unexpected collisions. This makes the prospect of having rotating platforms limited.

Entity Spawn Archetype

Strengths

Very powerful tool. Able to spawn any archetype entity at any location with any scale, position and rotation.

Weaknesses

Can only spawn archetype entities.

Opportunities

Spawning markers as a way of tracking movements, spawning whole architectures dynamically to create the environment.

Threats

I find archetype entities hard to set up, and access the properties, this could limit potential ideas.

Beam To

Strengths

Can instantly Move an Entity to a new location with a new scale and rotation if desired.

Weaknesses

You can't track the movement of the entity.

Opportunities

Dynamically moving lots of entities with no risk of collision problems. Is possible to reuse the same entities over and over for different tasks by beaming them to new locations with different scales and rotations.

Threats

If the end co-ordinates are wrong it will be hard to debug the flowgraph because you can't see what path the entity takes as it "teleports" to the defined location.

Due to Popular Demand...

My Physics Flowgraph

Explanation

The reason i created this flowgraph was because I couldn't find away to toggle the physics on and off without the engine crashing. The "," key is built into the engine to pause the physics but this would cause the editor to instantly crash, so i created this flow graph to pause and un pause the physics at will. Originally i was hoping to be able to pause the physics and then re-enable them and have the objects continue the pre-frozen trajectory but this was not the case. However when the physics were disabled, i was able to move the entity without worry of collision just like a "brush object".

How it works...

On key press a condition is called (which is initially set to false), then from there a TooBoolean module is called as is the PhysicsEnable Module from the same outputs of the condition. I like to think of the condition as "Is the Physics Frozen" in this case. From the False Output of the condition the Physics are then Disabled as well as a new input to the condition to make the condition true. This input comes from the ToBoolean module that with the combination of inputs and outputs im using, outputs the opposite of the input. This way a loop is created in a away so that the physics can be enabled and disabled at will.

Flowgraph Research

Flowgraph Node - Image:ColorCorrection

ColorCorrection - Crymod Wiki
This Node controls the color properties of the screen, useful for creating certain moods and atmospheres. In synergy with other screen/weather effects I'm hoping to find interesting ways to use create a certain feeling or emotion to differentiate architectures.

Flowgraph Node - Entity:BeamEntity

BeamEntity - Crymod Wiki
The Node allows an Entity to be "beamed" or instantly moved to a new location. I think some interesting results could be achieved using this node to instantly shift structures and other architecture in particular ways.

Flowgraph Node - AI:GotoSpeedStance

I couldn't find much information on this node, however it will be useful to master as it will allow me to control AI.


I'm also looking at other nodes to do with AI to add another dimension to the spaces i create. Creating an AI that will react to the peculiar changes in the environment.

Flowgraph Node - Movement:RotateEntity

Rotates an around an axis at a x degrees per second. I already have some experience using this Node and creating interesting dynamic architectures with it.

This Node will be useful for creating a dynamic space that will influence how people move; similarly the Node RotateEntityTO rotates an object between two points, this will be helpful in creating objects that rotate as a reaction to the players movement.

Flowgraph Node - Entity:SpawnArchetype

Spawns an archetype entity, the location, rotation and scale of this entity can be specified through the inputs. This will be useful in creating a reflexive architecture.