External Contributors and X3D Specification

The introduction of external contributors seems to have been a success so far. We recently comissioned six more buildings to students, including the prominent Geography and Planning building. There are now 7 external contributors who have been involved in uCampus, and at least two more have shown interest in collaborating with us in the future.

The contributors have to follow a (rather extensive) specification to produce the models. This aims to guide them step-by-step through the modelling process, starting with Autodesk AutoCAD files and ending with the X3D ones, with Autodesk 3ds Max and VRML being the intermediate formats. The specification has a number of details of a technical nature that are irrelevant to this post, but emphasis is placed on the homogeny of the models, and their proper formatting so they will be as efficient as possible.

There are considerable advantages in using external contributors -the volume of the building on the platform being the most prominent. By creating a detailed spec, we can take advantage of various people's different modelling skills, creating models that can be plugged in directly on the platform, and controlled by the system. The fact that most of the contributors are students means that they can be employed at the University payment rates, theoretically achieving some economy over market prices. However, this did not apply in the first few models (and especially in the case of the Arts Tower), so a new "bidding system" was launched from this month, allowing contributors to bid for each comission, and it being allocated to the lowest bidder.

Obviously there have been some difficulties as well, as it is to be expected when so many new people join a project. The most important one seems to be the difficulty of some contributors to conform to the requirements of the platform. This is more pronounced in the case of people with extensive modelling experience who tend to follow a particular work pattern they are familiar with. We are dealing with this by stressing the importance of the specification and explaining the differences of this project with a generic modelling job in commerical architecture. Practically all contributors faced difficulties with the X3D format, which was to be expected somewhat as it has more in common with computer graphics than CAD systems -overall it is a similar situation with what we faced with the students during the Interactive Urban Visualisation module. Drawing from our experience with the students, we gave to contributors short tutorials in X3D and, as expected, the results were significantly improved.

There remains an issue with people unfamiliar with AutoCAD who build everything in Max using meshes. Although the X3D can be fine-tuned to conform to the platform standards, we still have to deal with extremely big file sizes (typically 6-10 times as much) with the respective cost in the running of the platform -though the differences are not so pronounced in a single building, as uCampus expands in scope it can lead to serious performance issues. This is not easily addressed, as Max modellers would understandably find it tedious to learn AutoCAD, especially for a small comission. Final decisions have not been made yet -the two options seem to be either better screening of the contributors or just accepting lower standards and the respective performance costs.

Overall though, the introduction of external contributors has been a very useful step, more importantly so because it proves the potential of uCampus to extend to many directions and include more people with a very small amount of preparation. The next big step is the introduction of a specification for the taxonomical models. This should allow the project team to open the taxonomical modelling process to external contributors as well. Given the experience so far, this should be very exciting!