Museum Expansion, Coast to Coast - New York Times Under a heading of Museum Expansion, Coast to Coast - New York Times the New York Tmes has this fantastic interactive picture showing forty six (count them - 46!) museum projects in the USA alone...
Want ideas about what to model - this is it! Many of them are also illustrated.
The soon to be completed Grand Rapids Art Museum by Kulapat Yantrasast, architect will be looking to be certified under the LEED scheme as a Gold ranking building. If the data is available, this looks to be another useful building to model...
A List Apart: Articles: Semantic Flash: Slippery When Wet
Reading this article, I was almost convinced that there may be a place for Flash on web sites - but it asks for an amalgam of graphic design and programming skills that we don't normally find in one person... A team of people perhaps?
The Weissman Museum is to be refurbished and added to by Gehry himself. A building that was modelled in the digital craft courses some 10 years ago - now able to be re-modelled because the changes are sufficiently large..
Abu Dhabi Cultural District : The architectural 'stars' are all planning major 'installations' on Saadiyat Island. Gehry, Hadid, Nouvel, and Ando are all involved in different projects...
Plans revealed for a 'World Trade Center' in Oslo - Aftenposten.no By the looks of the building in the ilustration, what we have here is a building with galleries hat are daylit. The fact that the galleries are for temporary exhibitions of one sort or other makes this building end use different but the actual building form not a lot different than an art museum...
Something that might form a Digital Craft model? Definitely!
Calatrava unveils tower's latest twist | Chicago Tribune
This makes for a fascinating read - a spire in Chicago being 'sold' by the architect exploiting his artistic ability working with pens on an overhead projector at the meeting, but the most informative part of the newspaper story is the computer animation that was also played at the public meeting that is attached.
First activity - watch first seven sections of Visions of Light - a DVD on Cinematography from the Film Institute in the USA.
Second - review the voice over commentary of the start of Citizen Kane - the importance of light and shade, plus the use of the lighted window to link cuts / fades in the intro.
Third - the start sequence of Blade Runner
Fourth - reviewed the videos produced by the students in 2004 and 2005
Fifth - worked through several storyboard examples to understand how to document the planned video
Sixth - explored the nature of the type of presentation to be produced at the interim hand in stage after Easter when we will be presenting our ideas to the Music School's composition students.
Seventh - examined the role sound / soundscapes / music plays in movies - diagetic / non-diagetic - cut on action - sound as the means of transition between scenes...
Global Illumination - reviewing what it is and how to do it in Viz using Light Studio and Mental Ray was the pedagogical goal...
The reality?
We addressed the issue of Simulation, Simulacra, Reality and 'Hyper-reality' - more by reference to the issue of perception and the goals of communication via the image - than by a full review of Baudrillard (Wikipedia ref) or of the hyper-reality of Virtual Reality and High Resolution images.
The basic message was that the focus of image making in the course ought to be on communication of a story NOT merely on some highly detailed, high contrast, ray-traced-within-an-inch-of-its-life image. Contrasting images from Final Fantasy with images from Shrek is highly revealing of this. In the former, the focus and the hype of the original release was about the amount of time spent modelling Dr Aki Ross and the realism of the hair, skin and eyes. The truth is that the non-realistic rendering of the characters and the scenography in Shrek is far more involving of the audience, has far more character development pathis and humour. What is important in Shrek is a focus on the story - not the technology. The same should apply to every image produced in the course.
In addition, we reviewed again the tutorial 'Comparing Rendering Techniques' particularly the portion about the use in computer Graphics of bump, opacity and displacement maps. These can be used in normal scanline rendering in Viz. To produce realistic materials in Light Studio one cannot use these techniques - rather one must use special Light Studio materials with applied 'procedural' files that allow far faster rendering than the map approach.
The bulk of the lecture content was focused on the phenomenon of Global Illumination - a means of calculating light distribution in a space. Photon mapping, Backwards and Forwards Ray tracing and Radiosity were all described briefly.
At the end, the ability of the Deep Publish plug in within Powerpoint, Word and Excel to import 3D files so they remain interactive was demonstrated briefly.
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