Learning from Germany: Spatial... (architizer.com)

Love the mind twisting imagery ...

Learning from Germany: Spatial Advertisements
http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/dyn/27636/learning-from-germany-spatial-advertisements/

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MAKE | Ready-to-Wear Android Wearable Platform

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2011/08/ready-to-wear-android-wearable-platform.html
Around 3cm square. 32Gb data. WiFi. GPS.
A gadget looking for an application..
Something that with its tiny display has not enough I/O to make it useful... So the question they ask in suggesting on this site it is available is really unimaginative.

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Debunking the Myths About BIM in the “Cloud”: AECbytes Viewpoint #61

Debunking the Myths About BIM in the "Cloud": AECbytes Viewpoint #61
Another interesting paper from Graphisoft...
Seems to miss a fifth dimension in the cloud computing world: in addition to the 4 cloud approaches listed in the paper I believe there is a fifth. It is the web as service option. Running background analyses of air flow (CFD) or light (Radiance / 3DS Max Design) or energy (ESP-r or EnergyPlus) for example...


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Michael Donn

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Educational Curriculum in CAD - why is it the teaching materials have to be boring?

Scanning quickly through the new curriculum workbook for Revit to ascertain how it might replace our now creaky, because five years old, Villa Savoye tutorial I can see that the workbook is comprehensive.

That my students might want to dip into it to find out particular things I have no doubt. That I would / should subject them to the whole thing - no way.





Reviewing the "Harrison Fraker video" about BIM it seems to me that there is some confusion encouraged by that video to see BIM as somehow computational geometries. In addition whilst my students would find the ideas in that video of interest they would immediately notice the great gap between the hype of the video and the mundane reality of the worksheet:











Students in my experience like to be challenged. They like to work on stuff that is interesting and real and pushes boundaries. We had success years ago now with the Villa Savoye as a basis for an introductory tutorial because it was interesting challenging and real .

I still use it as a two x 2 hour tutorial session with homework in a modelling course that experience shows works well. But I believe it needs updating and extending into construction more than we can do in the one course. I hoped at first glance that this might be the case with the workbook - but no.

What I really want is a structured set of exercises where I am sketching in sketchup - say - Falling Water.

Then I am importing it and modelling it properly.

Then I am exporting it to Viz and rendering it and walking through it and creating interactive views (dwf / QTVR mov / 3D pdf)

Finally, I am going back into revit and building drawing documentation - construction details showing on the sheet rendered views of what it looks like alongside sections of how it is constructed and then exporting the whole to a set of pdf's that include 3D interactive views.

Falling Water this year; Guggenheim New York in the future; Guggenheim Bilbao in the future?

A conference on the web and the museum

I was directed to an interesting blog today: the NZlive.com Blog written by one Sarah Jones. That blog in istelf promises a lot. Meanwhile, there is a link there on the topic of blogging that points to the following:

Archives & Museum Informatics: Museums and the Web 2007: Speakers: "April 11-14, 2007 San Francisco, California"

Those people interested in the nature of the museum - what it might look like would do well to browse the papers presented at this conference. These papers expand on the content of the lively and interesting debate at the digital symposium at the Museums Aotearoa Conference earlier this year showed me some interesting aspects of 'the digital museum'. The cliche idea of the VR environment which is generating so much hype and hot air in our journalistic airwaves and print media at present gets looked at. And the much more interesting real world applications that the likes of Paul Reynolds writes from Auckland about gets the similarly cliche Web 2.0 treatment.

Museums in Second Life - someone has investigated it. Speculative and not very conclusive, rather suggestive of the fact they suspect there is a potential ...

Web 2.0 advocating change, rather than reporting results of research or implementation.

"The next billion"?

McGOVERN ONLINE
This is what is going to make the world tick in the future - opinions! Paul Reynolds from the first appearances of this blog has a sweet life. Trips every which way - the most recent to China courtesy of Microsoft, following on from Korea courtesy of IBM. However, given the distance NZ is from everywhere - even the West Island is 3 hours by plane - this is not the junket it seems.

What is worth reading here is some speculation about the future of information - increasingly such discussions are are housed in anonymous architecture. Anonymous because the buildings do not seem to be important part of the equation. Also of interest, as I allude to in the title of this blog is: apparently 1 billion people are now online. Microsoft are interested in being an important part of getting the next billion online. They are developing their own competitor to the One Laptop per child scheme. Check out the strategies and links on Paul's blog.

Lecture 7 - Digital Craft Render to Texture / Blogging carefully / Details - details - details

Tuesday 24 April 2007

Notes to a lecture:
Significant time was devoted to working through the example of making the label cloud generator on the class blog work by solving the clues offered by the misbehaviour: the solution was to identify what were relative and absolute link web addresses for the label cloud generator program.

We also went through again, how the blogging process is meant to provide a structure from which to build a final hand in for assignment 2. I referred people to the web areas of the www.reasonate.co.nz projects from last year... Good examples of web pages can be found from the people who did the de Young Museum - Arles Archaeological Museum - Federation Square. Ultimately the process of reporting in one place what you have done and how you have organised yourselves ought to be no more than collecting together the folksonomy tags / labels you have generated.

We noted the importance, now the tag cloud is generating, of yusing and defining tags that make sense to your group for later use by you in reporting how YOU organised yourself in relation to the group.

We touched on the ABSOLUTE NEED to attribute your sources and to remember the concept of fair use and also to remember to attribute all sources on your web site in teh same manner as you would in an academic essay. NOTE: not all references need be electronic. It is entirely OK to publish the source as the name of a journal / book...

We also touched in some length on the output requirements in terms of rendered views of the building. Some will be in Light Studio; some in Mental Ray. Some will be interactive in the manner of the Quicktime VR output of the tutorial, but some will also be interactive using the type of technology that Right Hemisphere offer through the Deep Exploration / Deep Publish software we have in the school. The latter acts more like an interactive game engine built into the web browser allowing people to walk through your design... In this latter case, the Render to texture ('baked' textures) Viz render option will be the most useful.

Want to weigh in on the debate?

Architecture Ed Changing to Keep Up

Now here's something to get you thinking - talking: an article at Cadalyst which says some interesting things:

With the AEC industry moving rapidly to 3D modeling and BIM technologies, universities are nipping at its heels in an attempt to remain viable and keep their students in demand in the marketplace ...

Although CAD courses are offered as electives, most schools of architecture don't require CAD for coursework. "We don't teach word processing for people to write," said Eastman. "We assume that people know how to write. It's the same with CAD. At the university level, it's very hard to justify giving course credit toward a professional degree based on how to use a tool." But, Eastman notes, although it is not formally taught, experience in CAD is gained through assigned exercises. ...

That's Chuck Eastman a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology Colleges of Architecture and Computer Science.

This is a debate that it seems to me has had no adequate answer for a long time, and for which there may never be a single 'right' answer.

I have been involved in core 3D digital design studio exercises for more than 15 years, and now a full trimester long core 3D digital studio for the last 7+ years. There has always had to be an element of training to provide some basics - preferably for no credit - and the conscientious student always does ok in this. There are always some who leave things to the last minute who do poorly at these exercises and the subsequent design projects and who complain that they cannot do as well with this tool as with the tool they would prefer to use. I recall exercises with ink and tracing paper where similar complaints were made.

The issue for me has been that this introductory modelling exercise requires an equivalent drawing organisation / construction documentation or similar phase in a subsequent core course which is a pedagogical experience that I believe is harder to create.

What is clear to me is that schools need to provide some leadership, but they also have to rely on students to practice the basic skills in order to become proficient. With most student copies of CAD software now at the lowest cost to students that it has ever been in 30 years and with computers capable of CAD also becoming affordable, that out of school practice is becoming ever more feasible.

Your thoughts?

3rd annual CGarchitect.com Architectural Visualization Competition (AVC)

This 'competition' run by CGArchitect.com has a requirement that people enter their best images now to qualify! Qualification round is April 16-21. Actual competition will be from April 23 to June 30.

To quote the site: If you are one of the select few chosen from the qualification round you will be eligible to compete in the 2 final challenges. Full details and rules for each of these challenges will be posted in the CHALLENGES section of the competition site.

Know anyone who might be up for the challenge? Pass on the link...

In any case cgarchitect ought to be one of those 'favourites' in your del.icio.us account. Especially the 'resources' section which contains tutorials and other information designed to assist the development of better images...

It's rather sad that there are only two images labelled Light Studio in the gallery of 10's of 1000's of images: One of them is by Klaus from Lichtplaner - the people in Austria who produce the software:











There are however, 137 Mental ray images like this from Martin Richardson of Flic Digital:

For those of you fascinated by the prospect of architecture/building practice in the virtual world

Second Life's population problems - Computerworld Blogs



This blog puts some of the hype about second life into perspective.It's clear that this community that I found gets very boring very quickly is only used by a small number of people. (57,000+ does not seem small, until one thinks about the total number of people who the hype suggest might be 'users'.



What I found most interesting about the blog was not the second life stats but the suggestion that 84 million Americans have home broadband and of these more than 5 million a day are taking tours in virtual space....

powered by performancing firefox

A really Annoying web site - for Steven Holl

STEVEN HOLL ARCHITECTS

Another Flash powered web site that provides no information - no intelligence, but rather annoys in its rich organisation and anally controlled access to the information it allows you to see. No mashups of this info with Google Maps!

Contains some interesting links to new museums - a successful practice.

TenLinks.com - Ultimate Directories for Technology Professionals

TenLinks.com - Ultimate Directories for Technology Professionals A very useful resource - at least at February 2007. Not just listing the top 3D software, but also for each package listing the top internet resources available for each...

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional: AECbytes Product Review

Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional: AECbytes Product Review
So: version 8 of Acrobat is available. This review examines the usefulness of this new pdf creation tool. It points to the imminent release of the new version of Acrobat 3D as allowing improved 3D interactive publishing in pdf format.
What is argued here to be an improvement in the v8 vanilla Acrobat is its ability to batch process output from AutoCAD - to produce a set of 'drawings' in separate pages of the pdf document. Where this places Adobe relative to the AutoDesk dwf format I leave to others to comment on. What is interesting is to note that apparently Adobe are talking to Nemetschek - the vendors of Vectorworks and the purchasers of Graphisoft, who produce ArchiCAD. Where this may lead, in terms of the dwf vs pdf format is anyone's guess.

Large format copy of O'Reilly Web2meme graphic from Flickr

Flickr Photo Download: Web2MemeMap

Web2MemeMap

Web2MemeMap,
originally uploaded by timoreilly.

Found on the web. Highly descriptive of the http:\\www.reasonate.co.nz underlying web technologies.http://www.flickr.com/photos/timoreilly/44349798/18th September, 2005timoreilly

Lecture 10 - Rendering

Lecture today covered the radiosity and light studio and mental ray renders.

I ran through some example tutorials on The VizDepot on radiosity and mental ray.

I noted the length of time renders can take and the need to test setting before embarking on a full render.

I pointed out that a radiosity solution is calculated before a render is done. In the example file a radiosity solution took 43 minutes and the render on top of it took anoth 23 seconds!

The process of 'baking' textures was introduced. With baked textures the lighting solution can be exported to an interative power point 3D model...

Also mentioned was the use of Light Studio materials - for the first time in 15 years, relatively easy - notes on the rendering tutorial on architecture-onlineteaching

BBSc 303 - Web Page Tutorial

BBSc 303 - Web Page Tutorial: "This tutorial will show you the basics of how to
set up a web site. Not just one or two web pages, but the philosophy
and thinking behind the organisation and presentation of information
on the web."

This was also the topic of half of the Lecture on May 16, 2006. Follow through / work through the site creation / publish options

Tags:Lighting

• digital_craft
• tags
• dreamweaver
• css
• html

Photoshop Luminance Equalization Tutorial

Photoshop Luminance Equalization Tutorial

Photoshop Luminance Equalization Tutorial for tiling maps

These two links to content from Jeremy Birn's web site related to his excellent book Digital Lighting and rendering

The second is really important for setting up and rendering your own materials and ensuring that when the material is tiled across a facade that the map assigned as a material does not show seam or join lines...

Tags:Lighting

• architecture
• render
• simulation

ecmanaut: Blogger publish ping and categorizer tool

ecmanaut: Blogger publish ping and categorizer tool

Tags:Lighting

• blog
• tools
• del.icio.us

BBSC 303 Digital Craft Lecture 7 - 2 May 2006

We watched an 18 minute 1995 video James Burke
. He described the problems of communication between Architecture and Building Science computer programs. He also described the beginning of what has become a programme of 10 years in length developing the Building Information Model (BIM). The pros and cons of the idea and what exactly the concept might lead to were the major themes of this presentation.

David Harrison then presented his paper that he presented in early April to the CAADRIA conference in Kumamoto in Japan. He described his research project and thus the background to Reasonate. He also showed how to use a number of the enhanced features of Reasonate, including a first introduction to how to use the new 'Web Page' feature to make and publish the web pages that will be a core part of the hand in of Assignment 1 and Assignment 2.

Tags:Lighting

• blogs
• IAI
• IFC
• Interoperability