Experiment 2: Week 3

Hey guys, once you've made your posts for this week's task, add a comment to this post with links to those blog posts. Just make one comment each that has several links, one link per post you've made for this week.

In case anyone's unsure, this week's task requirements can be found here.

As for this week's requirements:

- Upload images of 3 sketches of your chosen house, showing how their structural systems might fail over time without maintenance. (Most horizontal wooden surfaces should be caved in, concrete should be cracked and full of holes and what's known as "concrete cancer", roofs should be missing tiles / panels, glass should be mostly broken, steel should be rusted, aluminium should be slightly rusted, wood should be mostly rotten, etc)

- Name 2 natural disasters your house has been through (for some suggestions: earthquake, cyclone, hail storm, tsunami, hurricane, fire, blizzard, flood, lightning strike, volcanic eruption) and what damage your natural disasters would cause to it (eg, fires would leave most of the house's timber scorched black or completely burnt, floods would leave water marks and cause rot, an earthquake would cause major structural damage, etc). To give you some creative freedom, I won't restrict you to realistic natural disasters. You could equally do something like a zombie apocalypse, alien attack, meteor strike, robots taking over the world a la Terminator style, or other crazy but creatively freeing thing. Feel free to take inspiration from videogames and movies for this. As always, the aim for the end result is something that creates a really cool, immersive environment.

- Upload 3 reference images that show the kind of decay you want to model in your building (eg, from www.thehiat.org, or another source you think has good examples of buildings in decay)

- Discuss your ideas for decay with another student (or me) and post comments and suggestions given to you to your blog. Things to consider: What parts of the building will break? What will grow / spread across the building's remaining surfaces (moss, mould, cracks, stains)? What would be cool to make the process of decay interactive (refer to the end of this post for ideas)? What evidence of the building being lived in will you carefully reveal to the viewer? Will you leave evidence of what disaster caused the building to be abandoned (eg, newspaper about nuclear war, used up fire extinguisher left on the ground, sandbags piled up to try stop flood water getting in, etc)?

- Post images of your progress in developing the house in its state of decay.



Some examples of things that'd be good to add for interactivity:

- Things falling apart as you walk through the building (eg, a floor falling away when you step on it)

- Textures showing how materials age over time (your Crysis environment doesn't have to be realistic - so this option could be used towards a kind of timelapse showing your house decaying rapidly over 100 years, for example)

- Sounds of the building creaking and groaning that play as you walk through (eg, wooden floor boards, doors / shutters flapping loosely in the wind, papers being blown around by wind)

- Animating things moving around loosely in the wind (shutters, doors, ceiling fans) - Animals that now inhabit the building's remains (rats, crows, etc)



Don't forget that plants would very likely grow into and through the building in only a few years. After 100 years, you'd be lucky if there weren't one or many trees growing up through the building. Grass should be everywhere on the bottom floor, particularly near cracks and joins in surfaces.