DIGITAL DESIGN PRINCIPLES
Fun to start this blog entry for you. Mostly because you may come with expectations to read this entry. And the other element of excitement comes from knowing Digital Design starts with nearly the same principles of other design disciplines. And before you may or not think about areas of UX / UI and software design for application development in relation to thinking what Digital Design is. I want you to start thinking about the future and the idea of new media studies. Because this is much more of what Digital Design is. And not a website design. Things like IMAX, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and other new media platforms and studies would describe the discipline of Digital Design much more accurately. The narratives you would want to envision is the technological thinking about the visions for the future. From the design perspective.
And we will start with basic principles in design we will be stacking upon very quickly by deploying the advanced mindset for Digital Design as the established discipline of design.
This is the simple exercise to develop composition skills. The brief is to use the square art board with the white background. And to create guidelines in the right top corner to split the space in four main quadrants. To establish the grid system. And you are given the stripe of black paper of a particular size. To be cut this many times so it will produce only five pieces. The rule is that you are not allowed to position more than two pieces in each of the grid quadrant.
Welcome to Level Two.
Now the task is to start thinking sequentially in the progressive fashion.
All Design Classics come from Bauhaus. And we want to make our composition skills going digital by animating the poster graphic design by Muller Brockmann.
We are by brief creating a twenty second animated sequence to bring the graphic design poster to life. With the soundtrack of the classical music.
Ending up in the Virtual Space called the Paradise Deluxe.
The most key component of the Digital Design as the discipline is the aspect of the alternative digital reality to our physical world. This is not the game because it does not have the established rule but the experience. Of a Virtual Space. With the key focus on the World Creation process.
FINAL IDEA
OF THE VIRTUAL ISLAND DESIGN
When I worked on proposals I though that the idea of car customisation will be the final one but actually due to amazing Unity 3d learning resources I managed my modeled car to drive around the space with rolling and steering wheels which changed my final idea completely.
As the object to move around the space the car has quite interesting aspect of scale so the space could be expanded dramatically. So I started to work on race track for the car model.
It could be logically mentioned that the idea of the final project is basically just the mix of the two different ideas combined together. That is why I put parts of my proposals in this book to have clear understanding where the idea of making the island came from. This is very important to understand the design process and ideas generation. As you can see on the second proposal I took a deep look at massive public places such as museums and mall of the future design.
On the illustration below you can mention the final created space with some integration engineering elements into the nature environment.
Mostly due to Unity 3d high level of functionality and creative tools this let my idea to be expanded to such size and fit the classic genre of Grand Theft Auto game which is basic representative of virtual reality.
So my main point was to combine car functionality in virtual environment and apply knowledge and skill of building conceptual architecture across the virtual space.
Made Unity 3D engine. To be bringing all of your composition and design skills into the interactive environment. With the focus on architectural visualisation and Vehicle Simulation.
DEVELOPMENT // FUNCTIONALITY
In this section of the book I will explain technicality of interactional part of the project. Basically there were couple of hard challenges to face during the project such as – make the car behave like the real one and make the helicopter fly. I will explain those sort of things in more depth in this section and other functional aspects of the actual project.
Let me start on description of how the car was set up to drive. In order to achieve that I used several tutorial and came up with Java Script for it. As you can see on the illustration below there are different elements applied to the car geometry. The main logical process of that was to separate car body from four wheels, assigning those wheels as different objects and apply wheel collider component for them. I also had to apply couple of lights to the car object to bring realistic atmosphere to the project. I used parenting operation to achieve that as for the box colliders applied to the geometry as well which you can see on the picture provided. Rigid body component was applied to the car as well to make it behave like physical object with mass and gravity.
Where design follows function.
Here is the explanation of how the helicopter was setup in this project which was done thanks to the second Andrew Gotow tutorial and other materials from Unity 3d community forum. Basically the logical realisation was the same as for the car but the different script was used due to helicopters behaviour from real life. So as you can see on the image below box colliders and rigid body components were applied to the geometry. I had to configure input settings for the project as well in order to assign horizontal2 and vertical2 axis to be controlled by users because real helicopters use 4 axis to be operated like elevation, turn, rotation and angle of attack. In this case I faced a lot of issues dealing with extra geometry to be deleted from the helicopter body because it was slowing down the process of experience a lot. Second problem after I applied helicopter to the scene is the sun which was stuck in the sea with its lens flare so I had to fix that as well.
DEVELOPMENT // terrain
DEVELOPMENT // EFFECTS
To expand visual pleasure of the project I actually used several particle effects to bring more magical elements to the scene such as the prototype of “Sauron eye” from the movie The Lord of the Rings (J.Peter, 2003). This technology was also used to make waterfalls and volcano smokes. For all of three cameras in the project standard preset of skybox was applied to create the atmosphere of realistic and natural environment.
FINAL PROJECT // TEST
DEVELOPMENT
transportation across the virtual space makes the user the new ability to experience of the environment.
As the physical approach of the physical materials the steering wheel was created. Firstly it was made of piece of cardboard which was too light to be the car controlled with.
This is very important psychological issue of this project. Because the user experience the high speed driving experience this makes the brain to response to the real world almost close as the actual driving was taken place. The speed of reaction increases and user put more pressure into muscles when he/she experience crash or other extremal situation inside the virtual space. So this outcome brought me into a point where I had to cut the shape of the steering wheel from wood using different equipment in 3d laboratory of AUT university. There was a paint placed on to a wheel in order to make it more look like a finished product and make it more attractive primarily for young generations. The fluorescent paint was used to paint this object so basically if you put it over UV lamp it will glow which hits the brief’s requirement of the project to be a performance event as well. The stability which this controller gives to a user is very good and responsive and this makes the driving experience more and more attractive to be interact with.
This illustration above basically self explanatory of the final project. It is basically the complete driving experience which gives to the user the control of the environment and physical behaviour of the virtual car in the space. The important of the project is to be mentioned is that it is very addictive and involving process for the audience as well as the concept of computer games but with this approach you don’t need boring and NOT INTUITIVE use of keyboard and mouse to the car to be controlled.
So the whole idea of using a physical object which represents the steering wheel of the car instantly programmed into our brains because of the expectations we have inside our brains and very common sense of everyday live where we experience transportation with vehicles so often and so intuitive already. Sound played very important role for this project because it gave the atmosphere of presence to be experienced during the process.
The main priority of realisation the project was was based on the idea of spreading this media content around the world and integration into a commercial environment primarily into a game design industry where the interactive process is the main core of the media engine.
In this case this project must be used as the additional physical object to the game box which will be placed into a box. This can reduce piracy because you will need to get a physical object from the store in order to be able to use. Of course this is not something outstanding because there are many more advanced joysticks exist on the market but the use of optical connection let this happen without a wore cable. This gives a lot more control and freedom to user. As the statistical data informs us the race games and driving simulators are the big part of the financial success in the game design industry which confirms that this approach will be innovative, popular and exciting to use.
Training aspects of the subject covered here as the subject to be explained as well from the perspective of human phycology and the reaction to high speed environments both virtual and real. Outside of the driving simulators, there are discussed different types that people go through with different types of virtual simulators as well such as aircrafts, underwater instructors, manufacturing engineers, mostly focusing on aircraft simulators and the parts of knowledge that could be used in driving simulators as an element that can improve of the driving experience. Phycology is one of the prior focuses of this area of investigation that will allow to understand the details of human’s reactions and predictions during driving experience during driving, flight, and/or crash accidents, because the purpose that is the main reason for this research and core in automobile construction is the safety that is still the subject to be always improved. This is not statistical research but it deals with the frame of moving image industry and the way of how the knowledge and understanding of those issues can affect the design practitioner to be able to be aware of the process that is involved into constructing driving simulator with as realistic simulation as possible.
Time is very crucial factor that separates the leader of this game from the rest so the investigation of time should be good visual reference of the more pressures areas of the wind and air affecting 22 horse power vehicle with the weight of 4 tons. Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD was used in order to generate the map of airflow and the illustrative map of aerodynamics. This was done on BlueFern which is the most powerful computer in University of Canterbury, New Zealand that can perform the operations with such level of the complexity.
This theoretical section of the book constructed in the way that is eventually covers the subject matter of the research question presented in this book with covering particular areas of investigation. First direction is the vehicle construction itself and characteristics that it has. To stay objective there should be a clear understanding that this project is not as free as it sounds and issues of publicity and having the information that is related to this project might bring the company some unnecessary questions and attention that can low the safety of the project. It mean that the images and the content provided here might be a bit off the actual facts that the company has currently because the actual development of the vehicle is still the subject to improve and develop. It is also quite useful to be able to understand why the value that is assigned for this sort of knowledge and experience is important to hide from public and keep the policy of surprising release date due to the fact that it is all different and look like nothing else before.
It is very important to discuss issues of simulation of the vehicle in the digital environment and across the content of this book there will be covered several approaches and techniques that will allow to understand the process of the vehicle simulation in digital environment with different applications particularly with staying more artistic in Autodesk Maya using different expressions and with the research around the area and visuals that might be helpful for the properly organised and clean rigging operation in Unity 3D as well. Those are two main challenges of the task : set up an environment and set up the car using the script that simulates on real – time basis artificial behaviour of the vehicle in space with the proper movement or travel through the space of created conditions in the environment.
In this case it is important to study the mechanical construction of the vehicle parts and suspensions as one of the most sophisticated mechanisms that allow to correlate the body of the car with the environment. In the context of this process it is also very important to note the dynamic forces that affect this section and springs of pistons that have controlling the mass of the body with the reflection of on speed feedback from the wheel correlating with the environment.
Craft animations is the company that developed the plugin called Craft Director Studio which allows to animate 3D models of vehicles easily and not only driving vehicles but also aviation vehicles such as helicopters and airplanes as well as the controlling with the game controller such as Logitech Gamepad the camera that flies through the virtual space by using sophisticated engine that allows to simulate flight paths and take into considerations things like gravity and abilities for jumping and crashing vehicles with the full dynamic simulation of the suspension and such on. However it is not replacing key frame animation of the vehicles and moreover could be successfully used for convincing animation but for more dynamic and very simulated sort of motion the Craft Animations plugin could be used for such animations. It is compatible with all versions of Maya both PC and Mac and also with 3Ds Max, Cinema 4D, XSI and other 3D development packages. When the simulation is running all key frames like from motion capture data recorded and baked into almost every single frame keyframe so if you explore the Graph Editor in Maya it shows the data from the simulation which is very close to the curves that the motion capture stages provides.
There is particular plugin called Reactor that activates the engine that simulates artificial forces inside Autodesk 3Ds Max environment. It is also important to understand that it is not a plugin, it is built in 3Ds Max physics engine that based on dynamic cloth simulation that requires a special assign of the materials in order to recognise how hard it is to destroy the object and its crystal structures. There is an ability to create collisions with objects that will deliver the situation of the crash accident with the calculations of speed and mass of the objects that are interacting in the scene. Average time for this simulation even with the play-blast quality render (no shaders, no lighting, just geometry) is about 40 – 50 minutes just for simulating the crash. It is very intensive simulation operation but however it gives the realistic simulation with the very effective effects of destruction and deformation as well. In this case vehicle should be modelled in full with the anatomical correct details and parts of engine that might be destroyed and even the model of the test character or the human body could be placed as well with the assign of the materials on it as well in order to simulate a realistic reaction of the body inside a vehicle during a car accident. This is definitely the related subject of the task that is the aim of this project. This sort of testings inside of 3Ds Max could be used for calculating data of the time when the parachute or evacuation could be started as well in terms of safety of the project.
I hope these ideas have given you the glimpse of what Digital Design is. And how to think from a digital design perspective. This includes Digital World creation in the practice of Visual Effects.
A lot of the time we only think about visual effect as the idea to create impression in cinema.
Digital Designer on the other hand thinking of this process to be the simulation of reality. In bringing digital energy into the digital form. From the real world. And learning about the real world from the scientific point of view to simulate digital processes.
In multiple areas of display application or mediums of design.
