4//may//2009//week 9//workshop

This week marks the start of the construction of the actual product we were going to produce by the end of the semester. To start things off, we distributed the tasks needed to be completed. Firstly, we had to add the landscape animation to the current flash animation of the globe rotating. That task was assigned to Sean and I. The second task was the physical building of the frame. Since Luke and Vu came up with the design of how the frame slide would work. It would be the most appropriate for them to go source for the best materials and putting it together.

We could definitely work in the workshop together, helping each other be it with the frame or the animation. The final task was programming the phigets. That task obviously belonged to our most skilled programmer Chris. Knowing each of our individual tasks, we sat down for a final meeting discussing what kind of materials and where to source for them. We also set datelines for certain tasks to be complete. We tried as far as possible to keep up with the timeline we drew up during the prototype reporting.

Sean and I went home that day and started straight on the landscape animation on 3DMax. We decided to trying sourcing google for images first. We could not find a suitable image. Some were either too bright and most of them had the buildings already lighted up. We needed the buildings to be complete without lights as the number of lights would reflect on the energy consumption. We then decided to start from scratch. We had to start building our own buildings to form a city landscape. We decided that we should do 5 buildings and then multiply it round to make it seem like a really huge city landscape. After this was done we will probably add a paranomic sky view to make it more realistic.

Creating the max file sums up the week. That kept us really busy till the end especially with other assignments coming along too. We did not have much time to waste.