Porosity!

Final Porosity Machinima

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You can download the uncompressed wmv file here.

Porosity Hypothesis

Porosity can be destroyed or created by explosions.

To better demonstrate the gas/liquid qualities of porous environments, gravity has reduced to allow the free motion of particles and elements such as in a liquid suspension or lighter than air gas.The hypothesis is that explosions can reveal a porous structure from a non porous environment, or disrupt the porous nature of a structure.

This way, the explosions are unimpared by the Crysis gravity and entities collide in a much more interesting manner. With some changes to the envionment settings and water volume shader, it should be possible to include some of the ocean in the final product.

Porosity in Crysis

To better explore the notion of Porosity, I've tried to implement the ocean into the structure more effectively. The video below is a higher resolution (640 x 480), but it is a large file. Hopefully compression will fix this for later videos.

Imported Objects and Ramps

A simple enough ramp to go through lattice, the design is largely curvilinear, emphasising the smooth motion that will hopefully reflect the flow around the structure.

And on a side note, some interesting captures from working with the boolean objects from last week. I really like how these objects work with the theme of Porosity, and the explosion definately has recordable results. The only problem I have is trying to get my files small enough without making them unviewable when I upload.

Setting up Explosives on a floating Structure

 One of the entites created for augmenting the structure was this Boolean object, formed by the subtraction of a sphere from a cube. The cube made them easy to stack into large groups and gave them more predictable physics as well as the large "hole". SketchUp made these a little tricky to create as the boolean subtraction needed to be performed twice (one for the outer shell and the other for the smoothed internal

Porosity is the property of water to pass through an object, being "full of pores that allow fluids or gasses to pass through" (Wiktionary) was my inspiration for this structure. The Booleans are impaled on the structure with the ramp running as a support for explosive barrels. The explosion dislodges the booleans, destroying the structure.

Experimenting with Non-Explosive Destruction

Using the Villiage House Prefab and some basic physics as well as AI grunts assigned custom models, observing the effects of collisions and replicating the destruction of explosives via gravity. The gravity was set to -9.8 to reflect real world units.

This experiment revealed a few flaws with the physics engine, or more specifically the prefabs used, with objects having glitches upon collision and a large degree of randomness which had to be selectively eliminated in the videos (the whole thing went flying into space shortly after the video ends).

The Structure (Draft)

The lattice structure resembles a grid, and the elongation should be useful to create intereting explosions. Manipulating the structure itself would be difficult as it is comprised of several entites that are colliding together.

The theme of Porosity would be best explored through liquid, so the draft environment will need some changes, depending on what I can cmoe up with to best demonstrate fluidity.