Costain Crane & Timeline Systems
Lead Programmer
Unity 3D C#
Control a series of Cranes and rehearse/demonstrate construction principles to stakeholders.
Simulate construction plans with a timeline slider based on real CAD and construction timelines.
Originally created as a collaboration between Costain and Heathrow to simulate the deconstruction of a prefab building known as Startlight Point. Investigation quickly identified that the wrong crane had been ordered and that two cranes needed to be rented for this period, potentially saving tens of thousands of pounds in time and equipment hire. This work quickly morphed into a timeline management system which could simulate the state of construction at any given date of a flyover in London. This was created to convince locals and TFL themselves as to why Costain needed to shut portions of the roundabout during construction.
The timeline system was designed and developed by me, with the idea of making it as accessible for our art team as possible. It supports a Phase class which contains a list of Step Classes within its hierarchy, each step has an associated start date and end date. Steps keep track of their active or inactive state, and through this a step object component can be applied to assets or a hierarchy of assets. Step Objects can have be associated with a number of steps, with a collection of defined behaviors such as; Display During Step, Display Before Step, Display After. All of these objects and processes work together to allow the user to effortlessly view the sequence of works at any date, allowing them to either inspect planned works or to consider working conditions with equipment.
I also contributed to making a system for controlling Cranes and Construction vehicles with one generic control scheme, that could function and work with PC and VR Controls.
