We are getting everything in place for the big meetings next week!  Testing has been quite a painstaking process – it’s been interesting tweaking everything in the game to be as close to perfect as possible.  The bug list has officially been cleared and the final version of the game has been loaded on the laptops.  It’s just logistics for now – getting the 50 laptops together, all wired up and ready for the multi-player game will be an experience in itself!  (If anyone has any ideas about transporting 50 laptops around the city, we’re all ears). Everyone get ready to pick your character!

Come and experience enhanced 3-D visualizations of Chinatown today and scenarios for Chinatown of the future!

ACDC and our partners are hosting a community meeting on Monday May, 3 to discuss the development for the area south of the Turnpike in Boston’s Chinatown. We will also have an industry meeting for academics, architects, planners, and community leaders on Wednesday, May 5.  While interacting with enhanced virtual environments, attendees of this meeting will learn about issues that affect land-use planning in Chinatown and be asked to give feedback about potential development scenarios for the neighborhood.

We especially welcome Chinatown residents and community members to be participants.  All ages welcome!  The meeting will be translated into Cantonese, and bilingual youth will be in present to assist attendees in need of language or technical support.

I’m happy to announce that the model is complete and the game is up and running (in demonstration mode – looking for bugs…).  It’s been about 5 months since we started shooting pictures of Chinatown and feels great to finish.

The models are organized into 6 areas.  The are very large files and will take a bit to download, but if you want to check them out in the flesh, so to speak, you can

DOWNLOAD THEM as sketchup files HERE, or

DOWNLOAD THEM as .kmz (files that open in Google Earth) HERE, from MAPCs FTP site.  I tried to make the names of the .zips as descriptive as possible.

Also, some of the custom models I created for Chinatown, like the unique lamp posts and Chinatown Gate, are up on Google’s 3D warehouse at THIS LINK, if you’re interested in a much more friendly file size for download.  Would have put everything up there, but there’s a 10mb limit.

Feel free to add to the models and keep them growing!!  I had been thinking about promoting an effort to complete the model for all of Boston – to skin each building would be an amazing effort, something that could only be done with some good old web 2.0 crowdsourcing :) – shoot me an email if you’re interested, cbrown@mapc.org…

There are still a few videos I will post about the process, and much more to come about the game itself and the meetings, of course.

Enjoy the models!

An important component to this project is to involve youth (in our case, ages 14-19), especially those from the Chinatown community.   Now that we’ve returned to youth programming after taking a short break to work on the game development, I wanted to review some of the youth work we’ve done and our plan for the next few months.  We have a few simple goals that I’d like to outline here, along with some lessons learned and things to consider:

1. Involve youth in the development of the digital media. As a way for them to gain hard, technical skills, 4 youth interns were paid this summer to help us do initial research  and learn about how digital media can change the way people in the community can engage with neighborhood planning processes.  Victor, Lis, Karen, and Mei Hua (who blogged this summer, so check out the archives), worked on taking photographs of nearly every surface in Chinatown, which fed directly into Chris Brown’s 3-D Modeling work.  Victor and Lis were not from Chinatown and even though they were Boston natives, neither had ever been to the neighborhood.  For them, it was a new experience in a brand new neighborhood.  Mei Hua and Karen, on the other hand, are members of the Asian Community Development Corporation’s A-VOYCE youth development program.   The A-VOYCE girls were very familiar with Chinatown and were excited to engage with the community in a new way.  In fact, they were able to share the experience of attending their first community meeting for the Chinatown Master Planning process, and brought back some notes to share with us.   Of course they were the only youth there (with the exception of a few younger children who had come with their parents), which brings me to our next goal:
   
   Lis presents avatar profiles we’ve created based on interviews with Chinatown residents
2. Expose youth to current planning practices and recruit them as participants. This is something that isn’t new to us, since we already have a youth development program devoted to creating opportunities for youth to engage with their communities.  The goal of A-VOYCE is to provide opportunities for civic engagement and allow the youth to develop their voices through a weekly live radio program and youth-guided walking tours of Chinatown.  That said, ACDC does have a history of utilizing media as a way of engaging youth in our community.  Partly, we’ve developed this mode of engagement in response to the stereotype that Asian Americans, especially new immigrants, don’t have strong political voices.  basically, we’ve carved out new roles through which youth can experience, understand, and impact their own communities, whether they are Youth Radio DJs (to express their voices and advocate for issues facing their community), youth walking tour guides (to promote the neighborhood and bring attention to the rich history and cultural assets), and now, Youth Interpreters (more on that in my next point).So what explains the absence of youth in the standard community meetings that take place in Chinatown?  Is the process something that they have difficulty understanding (Do they need to learn all the big words?)?  Is the meeting held at a time when youth aren’t available (Are they too busy?)?  Is the topic something that doesn’t interest them (Is it boring?)?  These are the types of questions we are having our youth leaders ask of their peers, and our hope is that the game itself will allow for them to fully express what they would like to see for the future of their neighborhood.  A common teaching in Asian households is the virtue of respecting one’s elders.  Often this is practiced by not speaking out or contradicting the opinions of elders.  Community meetings in Boston’s Chinatown often have a large representation of eldery Chinese (40% of Chinatown residents are over the age of 50), and, especially for 2nd generation Asian American youth, the thought of speaking up or speaking out to a large group of elderly people is very intimidating.  This will definitely affect the dynamic of these meetings, even if youth were represented in large numbers.

3. Engage youth as interpreters during Participatory Chinatown community meetings. The role of the Youth Interpreter is especially relevant in the multi-generational context of a place like Chinatown because inter-generational relationships are nuanced by the differences in expected cultural norms of American-born teenagers versus the Chinese-born limited-English elderly.  To recap, in order to maximize access of this tool we are creating through PC, we hope to train youth to become interpreters for participants with limited-English proficiency or limited computer literacy.  In the case of Boston’s Chinatown, most residents with limited English ability are elderly and generally do not use computers.  What’s most relevant about the Youth Interpreter role is that most 2nd generation Asian American youth – and I can speak from personal experience – are often forced into the role of interpreter in their own families.  Whether it is having to attend your sibling’s parent teacher conferences, or accompanying a parent to the bank, Asian American youth are expected to fill these roles as the English speakers of their households.  These situations – again, I can speak for myself on this one – can often be…well, stressful.  The challenge for me, as the youth coordinator, is to allow the youth to feel at ease in the role of the interpreter, while showing them that they can leverage their language and computer skills to give back.  The other challenge is to make sure that the youth do not feel locked into this role.  They should also feel comfortable to be participants when they themselves are playing avatars and completing quests, and they will hopefully be active in encouraging their peers to actively participate in planning decisions for their respective communities.

A few shots of the model as it is today:

Just a couple shots highlighting the funniest part of data collection, and my interesting, some may say asinine, observations

I can’t believe I found it…   The Secret Hideout will, of course, be in the game, I was thinking a bonus level?:

(you can find it here in Chinatown)

If this sign won’t get you to put that bag of peanuts in the trash…

(found here, in Chinatown Park)

Creating the game environment is not just about creating and applying the textures, there is also the time consuming, frustrating, and sometimes fun process of creating the 3D surfaces to which to apply these meticulously crafted textures.  The best example of this is the Tufts Medical Center Overpass which passes above Washington Street between Kneeland and Oak here on GMaps.

There were 4 sources of information from which to start for the process of modeling the overpass – the BRA’s building footprints, which we used, the BRA’s 3D model, and Google Earth’s 3D model.  These sources combined with site visits lead to a representation of the area, rather than, an exact model.  We had to model the T station under the medical center (Orange line “New England Medical” stop), the entrance to the hospital with vestibule, staircase, and park, all of which were not represented in existing models.  In the future, I look forward to making a ‘process video’ showing the full timeline and all steps required to make a portion of the model suitable for texture application – it is a long and meticulous process.  The different ’sources’ for this model are discussed in this blog because there was no conceptual plan for modeling this complex area – I couldn’t even compare it to the BRA model or Google Earth because they simply did not represent the features in the underpass area.  The rest of this post will show some examples of what I mean to try and show what we started with, and what came out of the process, which will surely be improved as the project moves forward.

Site Pictures (see the area in street view here)

BRA (of course, no textures, but as you will see, it is not detailed enough)

(note there is one pillar, implying detail, but there is still not enough)

This is the north facing side – it turns out the elevation is inaccurate and there is no accounting for the features we needed in the game.

Google Earth

It’s a little hard to see, but the point here is that there is little, and blocky, detail.

That ‘block of trees’ in the bottom right hand corner shows the park and staircase area, very different than what is actually there

Game model (draft version)

Dealing with the round corner and vestibule…

Under the overpass – Orange line T stop

Another big  issue on this topic was the LIDAR collection used to create the BRA’s building footprint file, which was the first step to creating our simple model.  Check out the wiki page on LIDAR for a quick intro (previously posted).  To put is as simply as I can, when the airplane sends the laser down to hit a surface and be reflected back to get the surface and building elevations, it is reflected back by the first thing it hits (first-return), causing the building footprints to look as if a drape was laid over the city blocks – aka, LIDAR Fail.  Check out an example here on Google Earth – at the Empire Garden and Panang on Washington Street: (first image is Google Earth, second is Street View)

All around the model we had to be careful about making sure to delete ghost building footprints, and keeping the true footprints in.

We made this quick promotional video to screen in front of community members at the most recent Chinatown Master Planning meeting.  We’re hoping that this trailer will get people excited and looking forward to the project.

Subtitle:  Make sure you blink at least once every 15 minutes ;)

What is the best way to ‘photoshop’ a picture to become the texture for a game environment?

Most textures that I have seen in a game were, presumably, created by an artist to depict a fictional game world.  This project, however, has the obvious, yet strangely challenging, requirement that it has to look exactly like Boston’s Chinatown.  People live and work in Chinatown every day, and these same people are going to be playing the game.  To really get the players involved in a game (that they will be playing while in the game environment in the real world) we needed to get the game to look very close to what is on the ground

We had the added task of making everything a square (i.e. 512×512 pixels, or 256×256 pixels).  The pictures that came in to the production timeline were all taken with different cameras and by people with a different idea about how the pictures should be taken (in the future some better instructions will be provided – it is difficult to get a picture for a texture just right, but saves a great deal of time in the end to get them taken in the most useful way.

To turn this:

into this  (note the white space on top, it’s a square image):

And eventually to this, shown in Google Earth:

Photoshop attepmt #1 (6 steps):

After creating Area 1 (Corners of Boylston & Washington, and Washington & Beach), we got further requirements from the game developer Muzzy Lane:  SMALLER IMAGES: too high res (digital cameras can take very large pictures, which will slow down the game), SQUARE IMAGES…?

Try #2 (10 steps):

Even with these images, a few more steps were added by the Photoshop manager at ACDC, Catherine, detailed below in our 3^rd and final workflow process.  The new photos  have little or no white space at their side edges, making them very easy to match up and cover more area per picture in Sketchup.

Try #3 (16 steps…):

To create perfect squares without white space at the edge for faster photo application in Sketchup:

Save as…

Obviously, with hundreds of pictures to paste, every step in the process can increase the time needed for each surface, however, higher quality Photoshop work always mean less work in Sketchup in the end.  A Sketchup modelers dream texture is shown below:

Other Photoshop and Sketchup Tips:

For final edits on images, or to chop out an ‘upper floors’ section from an image, make Photoshop your default editor In Sketchup.  You can do this under I see this coming into play much more as feedback starts coming in on the model, there are hundreds of places I would spend more time on, if I had it, of course!

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts:

Ctrl+D = Deselect

Ctrl+shift+I = Image size (to get a smaller res photo)

Ctrl+N = Make a new canvas

Useful for duplicating windows and regular brick areas:

If you’ve made one window perfect and want to copy and paste it on top of an area where a tree is obstructing an identical window:

Instead of copying and pasting, you can use the rectangular marquee, select the area you are going to duplicate then click “v” (shortcut for the move tool) and then hold down alt and it automatically makes a copy but it stays within the same layer if you hold down alt and then shift, you can move that area over on a fixed axis

One more area to go…

Some quick photo updates:

I posted a couple fly throughs from Google Earth on YouTube for anyone to check out here and here.

Still working to get the file size down on the .kmz (Google Earth file) enough so I can post it for anyone to download, currently it’s at ~15mb.  The good news is that this is the current size for the full environment for Area 1, completed last night.

A few updated views of the model:

Yes I will fix that Dunkin’ Donuts sign eventually,

With a little character (pun intended):

It definitely looks nicer with the sidewalk and street textures in… Will have to remember that for the next videos.

Is that Fred Flinstone’s car??