NYT writes: Renzo Piano Embraces Chicago

An estatic review of yet another Piano building. Or is that - yet another ecstatic view of a Piano building...

Certainly worthy of a look for modelling. Any building that brings the New York Times Architecture critic to write "The beauty of his designs stems from his stubborn insistence that the placement of a column or a window, when done with enough patience and care, brings us a step closer to a more enlightened society." has to be worth a second look. 

Check out these links: 

NYT

ARTINFO

InteriorDesign.net

BBSC 303 Lecture / Workshop

Theme for the session: learning to relax ... and solve the problem.

Tactic: when an error message or dialogue pops up: READ IT and GOOGLE IT.

Specific example issue:

Export reliably to LightStudio:

Unfortunately, the Radiance renderer underlying 3DS Max cannot work with the object names that ArchiCAD or Revit are able to create. The work around is to Export to AutoCAD .dwg format. THEN in 3DS Max (9 if you are using Light Studio) using the AutoiCAD Legacy File Import format. This works for most people.

Those who have other issues often find it is due to some other fault with the way the CAD model is organised. One example we examined was the "set overflow in addobject"  error message: arising from objects being too close together. This can often be a result of the model having two objects that are co-planar (e.g. two identical copies of the same object).

A further strategy to be explored - particularly if your Revit model has "massing" elements in it - is to select to export ACIS solids rather than polyface meshes...

Use Max efficiently:

NOTES:

Many people are looking to use various combinations of lights (sun+sky) and cameras to create their renders. Rather than save many different Max files each with its own sky (and camera) - the option can be used for switching light sources on and off; and the option can be used to save 'scene states'. This approach permits the use of the option to set up a single job that runs (perhaps overnight?) to render all pictures (scenes) ina list.

has a "Multithread" option for using all the cores of a multi-core processor.

Select a bunch of objects and type a name into the Selection Set box in the tool bar - tis saves this selection set under this name.

The geometry file can be made much more efficient if you have multiple copies of objects such as chairs, light fittings, decorative facade elements, then making them into an array in the original CAD program, or in Max, ensring that all copies are 'instances' not real copies.

Render in mental ray and in Light Studio from the local D:\drive - it is 5 to 10 times faster than via the network to your 'My Documents' location. (Don't forget to keep the D:\ drive files and transfer then to the next computer's D:\ drive.

BBSC 303 Lecture, 19 May 2009

We spent a good chunk of the lecture reviewing the structure of a good web site that responded to the brief for the web project. The key was that the navigation should be simple, clear and focus on issues to do with making the model of the museum, not on the "assignments" or "tutorials" completed.

This is not to say that the requirements of the course are not to complete the assignments, but rather the brief of the web assignment shold be read and followed. 

In addition we covered efficient rendering in Max: mentalray and lightstudio have great similarities in terms of: 

• saving a map of the final gather / ambient light in a file (both renderers can be made much faster by saving this general light map; only to be used where the lighting conditins are the same, but capable of reducing the second and thirds render in a set for the same light condition by 40-50%.
• both programs support creating your own named settings files for the render process which remember all the settings in Final Gather or Light Studio from one computer session to the next. 
• both Light Studio and mental ray also support excluding the smaller objects from the render.  
• allowing the saving of image files in .hdr format to allow greatest flexibility in final processing of the render in photoshop (by adjusting the exposure).
  

Finaly, it was noted with respect to Light Studio:

• the 'simpleLS ' interface should not be used to generate any final hand ins as its picture quality is very poor; 
• the so-called 'expert' LS interface provides may settings for controlling the quality of the final render, including the ability to set a standard (local on the D:\drive for speed of renders) project file location.
• as noted in the online tutorial - and already mentioned in an April 11 2009 blog entry - the LS materials are to be found in a library on the P-drive. They are adjusted by the actual physical scalw parameters: e.g. 0.1m width planks for timber flooring. This requires the user to think carefully about the scale of the model imported.