ARCH1392 - Alichia van Rhijn

We have finally finished our final fabrication after many weeks of hard and constant work. I feel that the time and effort that we have placed into our fabrication has really paid off as I am very happy with the final outcome. I think that because Cameron, Kenneth and myself worked very well as a team and weren't afraid to tell each other if we thought something was wrong or looked bad, we were able to create a fabrication that not only looks great and has a lot of detail, but also functions and flows as a whole.

I feel that we have fulfilled the initial outcomes of the architects and ourselves successfully and to the best of our ability. I think that our environment really gives a sense of community and public space, where people can walk around and experience the building and the surrounding landscape.

All in all I really enjoyed working within the Crysis editor and learning the various skills and techniques required to create our final fabrication.

Below is the 200 - 300 word post about our final fabrication that I wrote and posted to our team blog...

"The final fabrication of our Bodo Cultural Centre has finally been realised after weeks of hard and consistent work. After receiving feedback from our last submission we needed to include more interactivity, add interior textures, create landscaping near the surrounding buildings, add more AI and include interior furniture. We feel that we have successfully addressed all these elements within the final stage of our fabrication.

Our intent for this final submission was to create a successful environment within Crysis that adhered to and fulfilled the architects and our initial outcomes:

· a social, public and communal space;
· a space that connects both the local community and its visitors;
· a space that responds to the expectations and imagination of both the local community and its visitors – tourists and/or migrants;
· a space that enhances the local democratic and social traditions, as well as the natural and pre-existing built environment;
· a space that seeks interaction (open to communal and diverse ranges of activities), playfulness and poetic contemplation
· an accessible space, a place to be proud of and belong to.
· a glistening jewel which plays with the diverse qualities of light in the arctic region and brings the spectacular atmosphere of the northern landscape into the buildings
· an urban project that seeks to create a cultural ecology
· a space intrinsically linked to the sense of human scale, participation and creativity.

Working on from our last submission we have included detailed immediate surroundings to the building in the form of parks and communal walkways that lead from the pier along the sides of the building. We have designed the landscaping to reflect the sense of community use and public space that is an essential aspect of the Bodo Cultural Centre. The juxtaposition between the stark white features of the culture centre and the surrounding landscape and harbour further enhances the architects notion of creating a building which emulates the ‘natural glacial topographies and the rigid city grid’ of Bodo harbour. We have explored this through the addition of detailed harbour features in the form of drainage pipes that lead out to sea, access ladders along the piers into the water, as well as rock walls that run the length of the pier. We feel that the implementation of these elements creates a greater sense of understanding and coherency within our environment and creates a realistic representation of what the harbour would actually look like in Bodo.

Being a highly conceptually motivated building, we have expressed particular efforts in modelling the environment and context of which the Centre belongs so we have also implemented much more realistic 'time of day' features which represent the overall environment within Bodo and the harbour. The inclusion of interior furniture and realistic textures inside and outside the building further enhances the overall sense and understanding of the space within the crysis environment.

It can be seen that the forms and masses of the Culture Centre emulate carved forms and a same solid mass; through this final stage we have developed and refined the angular and irregular walls that make up the shell for the Culture Centre. After receiving feedback there were certain elements within our building that needed to be analysed and re-evaluated. We feel that we have successfully implemented these changes within our building to create a more uniform and consistent culture centre. Within our environment we have also implemented various elements from our specialisation tutorials, such as advanced AI, custom loading screens and videos as well as custom animated models.

Within the final submission we have further developed the most significant element to the Bodo Culture Centre is how well people can use the spaces created by the forms. We have considered people using our space from a macro perspective (walking through the city) and then from a micro perspective (using the actual Centre). Through artificial intelligence we have been able to analyse and understand the dialogue between The Cultural Centre and the people who use it.

Finally, we have successfully managed to implement our own custom trailer videos at the start of the game launch. This then leads on to the menu where we import our custom map and it starts loading along with a custom loading image. We have then packaged the map so that a cut scene is triggered as soon as the game starts, which flows through the map up to our building where the cut scene stops and we can walk around and explore our building.

All in all we feel that we have successfully and coherently realised our final fabrication environment of the Bodo Culture Centre. The realisation and achievement of our intentions has created a successfully and pleasing environment within Crysis that adhered to and fulfilled the architects and our initial outcomes."