Web 2.0 - 2009

The lecture today trawled through the concept of Web 2.0: A google 'define': search produces the following Wiktionary definition: "The second generation of the World Wide Web, especially the movement away from static webpages to dynamic and shareable content".

The original Web 1.0 was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in the early 1990's. The arrival of Mark Andreesen's Mosaic web browser around the same time created accessible content: the first mix of text and images on the web, proving to be so powerful a trend that it "made the front page of the New York Times business section".

Examples of interactive web sites discussed are:
Flickr
Twitter
Blogger
del.icio.us

Technologies that are useful in the Web 2.0 world include RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and folksonomies built on simple tags [A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file). This kind of metadata helps describe an item and allows it to be found again by browsing or searching. ..]. The highlighted links at the top left edge of the BBSC 303 Digital Craft Course Information web page is constructed from an RSS feed reporting my Google (RSS) Reader subscriptions under the label 'architecture'. Just below this is a feed of my most recent del.icio.us links.

Other interactive web sites / services include:
facebook
myspace
bebo

In addition, we watched a couple of youtube videos:

The point? Assignment 2 requires you to "... actively document and collaborate online with your team partner and present the development of your project online in the form of a website." The goal therefore is to create a blog EACH, reporting your collaboration. The technologies of Web 2.0 are what will make our web sites readable, informative and able to be navigated simply.

The lecture concluded by referring back to the simple web page tutorial linked to the course web site. We covered again the use of HTML (hyper-text markup language) to place around text or media that affect its display. In particular we looked at the hypertext linking tag.

File translation issues:

The lecture on Tuesday 17 March and the tutorials on Thursday 19 March focused n file translation issues between the different original file formats in CAD and the 3DS Max file formats.

CAD	3DS Max 9 for LS	3DS ax 2009 for mr
Archicad	Export to .dwg: import via Legacy dwg	Export to 3ds; import
AutoCAD	import via Legacy dwg	import via Legacy dwg
Revit	export to dwg. import via Legacy dwg	export to fbx; import via fbx

NOTE: as covered in the online tutorials and in the tutorial class on Thursday, the Right Hemisphere product Deep Exploration can be used to clean up the object names in 3DS Max so that the renderers work properly.

Lecture 2: 2009 - Rendering with Max

The strategies for completing a rendering - a summary of the approaches that need to be adopted to Render within Max.

Basic concepts (summarised from tutorials):

• Global illumination - Radiance (Light Studio) and mentalray
• materials are specific to the renderer
  

1. light studio materials for LightStudio
2. Pro-materials for mentalray OR
3. Arch and Design materials for mentalray
   

• LightStudio only works in Max 9
• mentalray works in Max 9 and 2009: recommend the latter
• in both renderers define a sun and sky in very similar ways

1. Light Studio: Create tab/panel: Systems. Pull-down Light Studio option. Select Daylight. Choose location; date; time
2. mentalray: Pull Down menu. Lighting System wizard. Select tab. Create. Choose location; date; time. Accept options to make sky match sun and to set exposure for daylight with yes.

• in both renderers the 'indirect' illumination in bounces (mr) or as the 'indirect' box (LS) need to be a minimum of 2 outside, and 5 to 7 inside.
• In LS there are two render types: "Simple" FOR PREVIEWS ONLY and "Expert" for producing the actual renders.
• In LS there are many different materials, but 'plastic', 'glass', metal are the ones normally used. Have fun making a metal walled Gehry building!
• The LS manual is siomple and easy to read. The two tutoriala online should take you through all you need to know (the second 'advanced' tutorial is about lighting studies, but the materials section is useful for this course)
• mentalray has 'Global Illumination', 'Final Gather' and 'Caustics' settings: for this tutorial and most of this course, we will ONLY use 'Final Gather'.
  

Lecture - 1: 2009

Topics covered in the lecture:

The Course Objectives
The Tasks to be completed to meet these Objectives

• Task 1 - the tutorial exercises in Archicad, AutoCAD Architecture and Revit - plus Maxrender
• Task 2 - collaborating in the construction of a complex digital model of a daylit gallery
• Task 3 - creating a blog and web page to summarise the digital modelling

The Assessment Contract - and its role in reducing stress and workload
Workload management

The links to the past year's work:

• The Digital Craft BBSC 303 section of the www.arch.school.nz web site for models created between 1998 and 2005.
  
• And in particular the 'buildings' summary of these models.
• Plus the 'Reasonate' web site created by David Harrison in 2006
• Plus the Blogger web sites created by 303 students in 2007

Strategies for completing the tutorials and for choosing a partner to work with on the assignments.

More Autodesk Acquisitions!

At Nex Gen VizTod Stephens has noted the following Autodesk press release:

Friday, October 24, 2008

Autodesk Acquiring Softimage

Autodesk announced yesterday that they are acquiring Softimage.


It's becoming easier this year to see where the conspiracy theorists get their ideas from. Those who would claim that Autodesk is buying up companies so their direct competition do not would point to this as another in the long line of defensive acquisitions. Personally I am not sure, but this is a major buying spree!

I note on the same web site from August 20, 2008:

Autodesk Announces ImageModeler 2009Autodesk announced the release of ImageModeler 2009 at SIGGRAPH last week. This is the first Autodesk release of the software since they purchased it from REALVIZ. ImageModeler is used to create photorealistic 3D objects from photographs, including accurate 3D measurements.


RealViz was one of my favourite non-Autodesk tools that had lots of potential but an apparently small following - and the French developers seemed to have a great web site but no marketing smarts. Until last year when Autodesk bought it. I was starting to wonder what had happened to it. I investigated upgrading our classroom set earlier this year and despite the Autodesk front page to the web site got the usual slow runaround ...

Now, this looks like much better news. Presence with fanfare at Siggraph..

However, on another note, I am working my way through the Max Daylighting tool and wanted to compare its output to Radiance. The best way looked to be to use the 'new' Windows executables available from Francesco Anselmo's MinGW-Radiance distribution with the Radiance Control Panel from Ecotect. I have the RCP from v5.6. However, it is no longer downloadable from 'Autodesk Ecotect' web site... Pity. It was one of the more thorough and robust windows front ends to Radiance. No apparent reason for Autodesk to take it off the list of free software?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The world of Art has more money than the world of Building Research!

Check this out!

In Building research we try to get a budget to put some instrumentation into a building someone else is already planning to pay for... Temporarily. With this approach we work with the designers to improve what the owner is prepared to pay for - or if we are REALLy lucky - we get a small part of the research budget to add a detail (solar water heater? fancy smart glazing?) to the design.

It seems the Chicago based Museum of Science and Industry  has a different budget!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

New LightUp Photo-Realistic Rendering Plugin for SketchUp

Mac 3D: New LightUp Photo-Realistic Rendering Plugin for SketchUp -- UK-based developer has new LightUp SketchUp Plugin for Photo-Realistic Rendering and it works on the Mac!The news on the interweb at present - more and more and more plugins for SketchUp. Photorealistic = pretty or realistic or REAL? $64k question

read more | digg story

Planning a Semantic Web site

The Semantic Web brings with it the opportunities for users to get smarter search results, and for site owners to get more targeted traffic as users find what they really want. But these benefits don't just magically appear.

For the first time, in many years of following this stuff - since timbl first started writing his web from 50,000ft missives - the very readability of this article gives me hope I might be a participant, not just a user...

read more | digg story

Experimental REFERENCE (from the article): Semantic Web

15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About

15 of The Greenest Buildings in The World | Geek About
Incroyable! Where in the world does this hype come from?

And what's more, only a few people in the world seem to be asking sensible questions about it yet. And even then, the organisations that ask these questions such as the 'Greenwash Brigade' show their own biases when entering the 'buy local' debate. When they ask 'is a buy local economy really sustainable?' they adopt a xenophobic analysis that appears to assume that anything foreign is almost always bad and limits its reasonable compromise trade ideas to under or over 16okm distances within the USA. What chance remote places (New Zealand pop 4m or Samoa pop 214k) to produce anything but a few of the basics of life in such a non-trading future? The impression that is provided is the historic US isolationist 'I'm alright Jack' approach.

Very few people seem to be addressing the real issues: what are these buildings like to be in? (A couple of people who are: Usable Buildings and 'Performance in Practice' ). From time to time one hears rumours about buildings that have 'gone wrong' and are no longer being touted as 'low energy' / 'good passive design' / 'sustainable' / 'healthy'. What seems to happen, as I heard when I asked about a building I had photographed when on a visit to the USA recently - and about which I had blogged a year or so ago, is that the owners shut down all discussion. This just adds to the legends of sun umbrellas inside to combat solar glare and debates about whether the required performance analyses were done. Perhaps we would move beyond just ticking the appropriate in a LEED score system if we honestly reported mistakes and examined why they occurred? If assessing the performance of a building from its users point of view became mainstream... this type of press coverage would cease. Instead of passing on uncritically the PR of the designers, we would be reading carefully constructed assessments of the real performance 'meters' - the people who live in and occupy the buildings and their community of passers-by and other affected people.

Ref: 'It's way to easy being Green': "Installing a $395 bike rack is worth the same under the LEED checklist system as installing a $1.3 million environmentally sensitive heating system."

Air Conditioning

This post is about two things - a talk on Passive Cooling in Malaysia and this extract from an email that i received today:
Attire
Conference attire is business casual. We recommend bringing a jacket or sweater (the conference rooms are air-conditioned) and comfortable shoes for the walk between the [conference hotel name] Hotel and the Conference Center.

At the presentation by a visiting colleague from Malaysia on alternatives to air conditioning in large buildings in Malaysia, it was noted that for passive cooling to work one needs reliable air movement and this is not available in much of urban Malaysia. Even in areas where breezes occur, one needs tallish buildings to rise above the shelter provided by other structures to be exposed to the wind. This suggest some issues of privilege where passive cooling is only for those rich enough to be able to afford to live at a high level. However, what interested me was the temperature set points and comfort in Malaysia: questions of persuading people to lift the set points of their chiller to 24C instead of 22C! In the temperature measurement studies, with passive cooling the spaces being cooled were at 26-28C! This would suggest that passive cooling is an impossible goal - never achieving 'comfort'. Or perhaps - using the the adaptive comfort model [Brager and de Dear (DOI: doi:10.1016/S0378-7788(97)00053-4 Energy and Buildings Volume 27, Issue 1, February 1998, Pages 83-96) ] - we behave differently in air conditioned as opposed to naturally ventilated buildings.

So, coming back to the conference email, someone like myself who has very little day to day experience of air conditioning, and is therefore adapting to my hotel room internal climate needs this type of warning because in my experience the conference seminar room air con is freezing. What these people are saying is that it is so cold in the conference seminar rooms you will need to wear a jacket to stay comfortable! I cannot help but think we might be able to develop a huge window of energy availability by altering thermostat settings on chillers in cold climates. I have recently in China experienced the awfulness of air con: walk the streets and suffer in high humidity and 35+C temperatures. Walk into a shop - though the wide open door and feel so cold that a jersey is needed. This is just plain insanity.

On a rough calculation: if the temperature outside is averaging 34C and inside is set to 22C - then the savings of a 28C set point are around 50%! And I believe that the adaptive temperature studies suggest that people would not be less comfortable - they might even be less stressed, not having to cope with such extremes of temperature inside and out.

Casa da Musica: Rem Koolhaas building in Porto

VRMAG - VIRTUAL TOUR OF REM KOOLHAAS’ CASA DA MUSICA, PORTO

I visited this building in 2005. My photographs however do not compare to these 15 x 360 panoramas. These do give a good feel for what i might be like to be in / visiting the building.

It is to me a building that demonstrates the power of careful thought and analysis to achieve the best building science as well as architectural outcome. However, given the delays and cost increases, it is also a building that appears yet again to give a bad name to this type of architecture - architecture that tries to push the boundaries.


Technorati Tags: auditorium, architecture, koolhaas, acoustics,

Information Modelling In Action

The Freedom Tower: Information Modelling In Action - CBRonline.com Computer Business Review online writes about BIM! Quote from Paul Seletsky of SOM: "...Autodesk Revit Building 3D modelling gives the architects the ability not only to visualise their models in 3D, but have those models tied to 2D plans too: if a value is changed in the model, it is reflected in the plans and vice versa. It also enables simulations such as likely building temperatures, pedestrian flow (including in a potential emergency), the lighting as the sun moves across the sky, and so on." I guess this is BIM in action ...

But it all seems a little too pat. The details are sketchy in a general business magazine like this of course. But the details are where the problems arise. Did the HVAC consultants and the fire engineers really use the 3D model? Did they make modifications and send them back to the central model? What were the SOM resources required to make this all happen?

My experience so far is that using the collaboration features of the software (ArchiCAD/Revit?ADT/Microstation) requires a major support effort from technicians running the network and servers to the users rejigging their manner of working to recognise who has control of what parts of the 'model' they are working on. And that's just with the 3D model in-house... well in my class. What about adding in several other software users, their ways of working and their program interfaces...

What is the reality?

Postopolis - blogs about architecture collide in NYC

Check this event Postopolis. out. (May 29 - June 2, 2007) The home blog pages of the organisers are (almost) all in the useful links in the sidebar at the right. After today I will be adding Inhabitat. At this early stage, the following links are really interesting:

• City of Sound review of Postopolis presentation by Paul Seletsky of SOM
• City of Sound review of Postopolis presentation by Matt Clark of Arup
• Inhabit's Jill Fehrenbacher's presentation in Pecha Kucha style
• I could not bring myself to listen to Lebbeus Woods yet again after wondering at the level of pretension in hearing him live in San Francisco some years ago... but if you have not encountered him, this could be of curiosity value - if only a la Derrida to hear the background to the person in order to (perhaps) understand his work?
  

I fully expect these links to grow and become more interesting as the diarists who are not as fast as City of Sound reflect on the event.

Cool idea? Or another hyped toy?

There is a cool video referenced by Autodesk's '"It's alive in the lab!" blog and available on youtube:



They note that the technology idea was used in the Minority Report movie.

There is also this REALLY cool video about the same technology toy at Fastcompany.com


Looking at it, I can't help wondering what it really shows.

• Of course, I'd love a screen that big! And I'd discover many uses for it.
  
• And one with that many video feeds that work simultaneously...
• It has been clear to me for a long time that the mouse is only a poor substitute for the hand in interactivity terms. But do I want to have to wear white gloves or spend ages with some cleaning fluid each week keeping the screen-as-mouse operaional?
• An interaction work space the size of two offices - that's great for spreading out the work so one can walk up and down and survey more of a whole set of data
• And wouldn't the wii be a better interface (see Google Reader via wii below)?

What I am not sure about is whether this particular interactive screen technology from this bloke 'solves' the problem.

As yet there seem only to be positive reviews:

• "It's alive in the labs"
• "RobiNZ"

I am not convinced. Given the choice, and the budget to play with such toys, I'd like an immersive wrap around wall first. Then this technology for working with it.

lecture topic - May 29 2007 - handin ideas - assignment 1

Visual Styles in Autocad - there is a video on how to do them a a pdf on how to set up a style on the R:\BBSC\Course_Material\BBSC303\autodesk_adt drive - another way of doing the CAd program render and exploring possibilities...

Rendering softer images like this is also possible in Archicad - there are help files and tips on the use of Archicad on the R:\BBSC\Course_Material\BBSC303\archicad drive

Quicktime movie sun studies in Archicad / Viz are easy / Revit - and count as one render

Right Hemisphere 3D insert files in pdf (v5 will be installed very soon)





Warn people about impact of your choices:

• Right Hemisphere Deep Publish files ONLY Load in Internet Explorer
• Big files take a long time to download
• Link to adobe for acrobat reader
• Format of page may work best ('be optimised for') IE

Light Studio rpict NOT rview images should be produced... (i.e. Saving an rview 'simple', fuzzy, low res. light studio file will be marked down)

High Quality Images from Light Studio (once the geometry issues are sorted) are easy to produce - for examples: Irena Pratley's work from 2002:










NB: focus in Thursday's tutorial on getting textures like brick sorted...

• we looked at brick as a light studio material - this has a dirt modifier for better 'realism'
• we mentioned that the English version of the light studio material file library is on the P:\drive
• we noted that there are many light texture material files (so-called) cal files in the materials\library directory - these can be used to create corrugations or water via a formula
• we noted that rendering efficiency is improved in Light Studio by looking carefully at the material definitions

There are two new Revit user tutorials provided by Autodesk that are on the R:\BBSC\Course_Material\BBSC303\revit\autodesk_BIM_curriculum drive. In the metric_datasets folder is a 323 page pdf format workbook on the use of Revit! In the files_metric folder there is a guide, also in pdf, on the use of Revit files in 3ds max /viz... Whilst the 323 page book is something I have written about before as incredibly boring, it is worth mining for some gems of information, such as how to key colours on a plan / sectional model to data such as room names or areas:





NOTE: tehre is a simple blog here that describes how to create the space labels that are used for this style of presentation.

"Guns Germs and Steel" author Jared Diamond

Great title! The follow-up, Collapse is an even better read, but far less memorable title. Can't help thinking there are so many intuitive leaps with little supporting documentation that Diamond is a little like the 'von Daniken' of the noughties.

Still, a challenge is laid down to think and to react and form an opinion as to what to do/ how to react.

Most interesting part of the book? Again, not the mainstream ideas, but rather the process hinted at: Diamond thanks his graduate classes for their participation in reviewing the content of the book chapters. A way of combining teaching in a challenging manner with book writing?

A headline I couldn't resist: The Hippies Were Right! /

The Hippies Were Right! / Green homes? Organic food? Nature is good? Time to give the ol' tie-dyers some respect
The whole of the Bay Area is full of people who write and think like this. They still sell tie-dyed T-shirts and other clothing in the Saturday markets in Berkeley around Telegraph / Bancroft.

Scratch the surface of most of those comfortable homes in the quiet streets surrounding the University of California - Berkeley - and you will find people who have done quite well for themselves as hippies who grew up. They are still passionate about the whales / spiritual values / improving the planet neighbourhood by neighbourhood.

But, they have had the resources to do this. I keep wondering where the wealth has come from to make this happen. After all the Prius is (in my terms) a rich person's car. These quiet suburban homes cost a bomb in international terms. Of course, there are squillionaires who I am ignoring, and even more dangerous to the environment those people building 1200 sq m mansions by the thousand. But I am left wondering how we can learn from these lessons if they continue to cost as much to implement that only those hippies who live in the readership area of the San Francisco Chronicle can afford to do them well...

Still: love the ironic tone and writing style. This is what large populations do deliver: quality writing that is good to read.

Thom Mayne: Architecture is a new way to connect to the world

Given that Mayne is leading a firm that regularly uses GC to generate form / explore ideas; that gets involved with LBNL in projects that push the boundaries of what is possible from an environmental performance point of view; that has a 3D printer in-house for constructing models of staff ideas; and that has been adulated / emulated by architecture students in the past for the complexity of its hybrid drawings - it was interesting to see what was focused on here in a TED lecture: the drawings and the environmental performance somehow intertwined. Not quite what I had expected.

My only problem is that having visited the CalTrans building in LA, it seems very much in need of a few emperor's-new-clothes question or two. It is exciting and intersting when you knwo what the parts are supposed to do. However, it feels very much like a New Brutalism - as powerful in its ugliness as much modern classical music. Hard to see it being popular - in the sense of being liked by people who have to walk past it - cannot comment about the worker experience inside.

William McDonough: does Larry Lessig

Came across this entitled "The wisdom of designing Cradle to Cradle" whilst looking for other stuff - as you do. What struck me about this was the presentation approach. We have heard all this before over the last 30 years in one form or other.

What seems to be unique here (apart from the obvious - that WM is hugely successful in terms of the work his firm is doing) is the Powerpoint owes more than a little debt to a style I blogged about earlier this year. It is a style of presentation used by Dick Hardt in his Identity 2.0 presentation but named after Larry Lessig - the internet copyright guru.

lecture topic - May 23 2007 - Rendering issues and ideas

Today Justin presented his Light Flow meter research with a request that one of your Light Studio renders is run with the light flow meter (see above from Kit Cuttle's book on Lighting) inserted into the picture taking up 30% of the view... AND the RTRACE render commands are followed to calculate the light intensity on each of 6 cardinal points of the white sphere.

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?

Death by Architecture - Architecture Competitions

Death by Architecture
How specialist can you get? This site focuses on publicising architectural competitions. Sort by deadlines - type of participant - region etc. Find (at present) claims for 'First Design Competition for Second Architecture' - yet another take on using second life. Interesting but ultimately as with much of SL - vaguely ho-hum.

This web site really ought to have an RSS feed. Who wants to browse it every second day? What I want is to enter some search terms and be kept up-to-date... Apart from this easily fixed problem - a useful source/site.

lecture topic - May 16 2007 - Preparing final hand-in

The topic was examining images from the past to develop a plan to present well.

We talked about:

Ensuring that the images presented in the final render set developed a theme about the building. The goal was to try to focus on presenting in images some form of narrative that enhanced your reader/viewer's knowledge of the building or of the process of modelling or of the process of rendering... Examples that were presented of acceptable foci for a themed page were:

• comparison of the Light Studio and the Mental Ray renderers (e.g. time vs quality)
  
• an analysis of the way(s) in which daylight reaches the interior through sections and other views
• an analysis of the architect's writing about his/her building is revealed in the form /light interplay
• an examination of the role of light in the progression one makes through the building from outside to in or from gallery to gallery ...
• representation / revealing of the qualities of light in the major spaces in early morning / late afternoon - summer / winter - night / day - sun / overcast conditions
  
• interrogation of the design principles - formal / rhythmic / organic / asymmetric - affect the flow of light

We noted yet again that there is a requirement in the assignment to include the following (NOTE again, that both renderers must be used):

Assignment One - Part B

• Minimum
  The fifteen rendered images should be visible on the website in thumbnail form. Appropriate background image(s) to represent the view out from the building, or appropriate "textures" applied to art works in an art gallery or similar contextual information will be required.The web page should also contain appropriate text documenting: your name, the name of the architect, the course, the date and the name of the modeling and rendering packages used to produce each image.
• Below Average
  All above, plus: at least ten renderings using Autodesk Viz to simulate realistic lighting conditions in the space(s) in a minimum of two different ways using Global Illumination and not (7 of one approach: 3 of the alternate is the maximum deviation from the desired 5:5 split in pictures).
• Acceptable
  All above, plus: documentation of the image differences and the settings used and time taken to render between the two Viz renderings approaches.
• Average
  All above, plus: all fifteen renderings using AutoDesk Viz/Lightscape AND Rayfront/Radiance to simulate realistic lighting conditions in the space(s) NOTE: with the arrival of the LightStudio plugin, it is important to recognise that the split here is between the (Mental Ray) PHOTON MAPPING rendering approach and the (RADIANCE) BACKWARDS RAY TRACE approach. Thus the different renders are Global Illumination within the Mental Ray Renderer in Viz and Radiance with the Lightstudio renderer in Viz.
• Good
  All above, plus: use of AutoDesk Viz/Lightscape AND Rayfront/Radiance/LightStudio to simulate realistic lighting conditions in the space(s) with some additional images at night (say 6 daylight rendered with one program and 9 daylight with the other, plus 3-6 with artificial lighting); and all thumbnails link to larger minimum 1280x1024 images on your personal web site.
• Above Average
  All above, plus: association of the idea, concept or theme being communicated with a critical idea, concept or theme: e.g. analysis of relationship between this building and others by the same architect or others from same era; or analysis of natural lighting via sky and sunlighting; or examination of systems of circulation through buildings and demonstration of which system this building belongs to ....
• Very Good
  All above, plus: use of Autodesk Viz/Lightscape and Rayfront/Lightstudio for four of the views showing how the natural lighting models compare between the two rendering programs.
• Excellent
  All above, plus: ... you tell me (the possibilities are endless)?

I also noted that the software for hdrshop is available for use on the Course Information directory. This allows one to import a series of identical images of different exposure level and amalgamate them into ONE High Dynamic range Image. (i.e. to take a series of photographs of a sky and thus use it as a light source for ones scene as explained in this online tutorial)









hdrview is available on the same R:\esources directory if one wants to view the hdr image. There are plenty available online - just check FLICKR.

Also we examined the role of procedural materials in making more interesting images than can be achieved with materials which are merely pictures pasted onto surfaces... This work from Irena a couple of years ago is an illustration of a procedural texture in Radiance - the underlying render engine to Light Studio:













And finally, a couple of words of caution:

1. bringing files into Viz successfully is only part I of the render process. Make sure also that you can render in Light Studio and in Mental Ray. If your object names are very long because of the manner in which you have brought the model into Viz, then the Light Studio renderer will not work. You must fix this somehow by altering the layer / object names in the export process, or by importing the file into Deep Exploration and then re-exporting in the simpler form...
2. As noted at the beginning of the year, Light Studio only work in Viz - if you have exported to Max for mental ray, then be aware that you will be competing for a much smaller number of licenses than with Viz come crunch render time AND you will still have to export that model and read it back into Viz to use Light Studio
3. There is a major flaw in the Viz 'section' tool that stops it from producing sections that are orthogonal to the building - because sections are created by setting 'cutting planes' in Viz/Max camera definitions. The work around is that one can create the files in Viz and with the mental ray renderer run the 'render to texture' option. Then save the file out as a 3ds format - with named camera views. THEN within Deep Exploration (DE) one can set up the section plane (+X) rotated and placed where it shows off the interior best and from within DE... Witness this simple B&W model rendered with a cutting plane:

Footnote: link to hdr render and good caustics for water in same tutorial when compiling this blog.

lecture topic - May 15 2007 - narrative

More video watching - this time extracts from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering's documentary about Jacques Derrida.

Specifically:

• you call this verite?
• Echo and Narcissus
• the sex lives of philosophers
• without even an ash

As a means of understanding narrative and film - try to get inside the mind of the authors (whom Derrida addresses often on the subject of whose story is being told by their editing decisions). Try to ask -

• when did the quotes get assembled? before or after the filming?
  
• why two cameras?
• what were the other people shown in the video at the end of the movie doing and why?
• would the narrative of the episodes we watched change if played in another order than the movie (ref Eisenstein etc)
  

Review: Paris Rive Gauche development

Paris Rive Gauche - Architecture - New York Times no new museums that I can find - in the general discussion. However, this does sound like a really interesting debate. I'd have to say if it ends up like la Defense - then its yet more destruction of a city's fabric in the hope of some innovative freedom for individual designers to express themselves. The wonder of the older parts of Paris is that the anonymity of the similar height / facade / fenestration architecture is enlivened by the life in the streets - the corner cafes and the odd ball petrol stations and cafes jostling for space with the parked cars and bikes and the people wandering and bustling through the streets, occupying the ground floor. It is a revelation and a great pleasure to cram one's luggage into one of the tiny 'hotel' rooms in one of these buildings, where the hotel is merely a couple of floors of the whole apartment complex, with a cafe / bar on the ground floor. This review does not promise that type of 'life'. However, in all these discussions, I wonder where are the voices of the people who have to live in these buildings. Do people actually like / prefer to live / work at la Defense instead of in the hearts of some of the older arrondissements? Will they want to / do they already want to move into this new Rive Gauche? Sounds like a research project?

(Photo illustrates Sunday morning in la Defense 'neighbourhood')

lecture topic - May 8 2007

Favicon - How To Create A Favicon.ico | PhotoshopSupport.com

This is one of the topics we covered briefly in the lecture on Tuesday: how to create one of those favicons that appear in the navigation bar of IE7 and Firefox?

The explanation here is of using a Photoshop plugin to create an icon in the correct format - so far so good. But then, most usefully, there is a discussion of how to handle the html to make that icon appear in the place(s) it should...

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.

Yet another US Museum - SAM in Seattle

A paean to art, not the architect - ARCHITECTURE REVIEW - Los Angeles Times - calendarlive.com

Interesting to see the art vs architecture debate continuing...

This however looks awfully (choosing my words carefully) like an office building from the outside. So of course one praises the verticality...

Lecture 8 - Digital Craft Render Details

Concepts covered in class today:
Global Illumination and Final Gather in Mental Ray

• avoiding long render times for outdoor renders by enclosing the whole scene in a hemisphere
• making the hemsiphere normals face inward so it is visible
  
• using a map on the hemisphere as a background - improvement over an environment background
• Final Gather as a means of producing quick outdoor renders
• 10,000 minimum photons may produce blotchiness which may be 'solved' by FG but may not
• creating a light that ONLY shines on selected objects to illuminate the background sky...
  

HDR images

• what are they?
• Debevec and Ward websites as resources for their work on HDRI
• use of HDR as output that is flexible from LightStudio
• Use of HDR images as a source of light in a scene
• (as an aside - use of a map in a light definition in Viz as a means of cheaply creating shadows)
• requirement to include an HDR image in the final hand in
• 
  

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended: AECbytes Product Review

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended: AECbytes Product Review

Photoshop in 3D! This review makes for interesting reading - but I am unsure how anything offered adds as much as other pieces of dedicated software offer in greater depth. The only advantage seems to be that it's Photoshop! Familiarity with the interface offering 3D image manipulation functionality that is comprehensive because it offers more than Photoshop used to, not because it is comprehensive...

Animation Class lecture - editing

Today we watched the end (New York onwards) of the magnificent 'Vision of light' DVD about Cinematography.

Then we discussed editing by contrasting the editing efforts in the car chase scenes of The Italian Job (1968), Bullitt (1969), The French Connection and Ronin.

Next week we will compare a scene from Luc Bresson's La Femme Nikita with the exact same scene from Assassin (Point of no return) by John Badham.

We concluded by examining how backburner can be of assistance in speeding up rendering.

Serpentine Gallery 'Folly' to be spinning top made of plywood

Oh the joys of photoshop. These rather banal photoshop efforts have been used Thursday to announce the Serpentine Gallery in London's annual summertime pavilion. These make it appear a rather innocuous and oddly disappointing work of artitecture.



However, it does sound like the experience of the building could be more interesting if the sculptor half of the design team 'Danish-Icelandic artist' Olafur Eliasson has his way: "These might include adding vibstrational qualities to the building that would make it resonate like a musical instrument..."





Technorati Tags: architecture, folly,

UK Government ~$120k grant for Architecture students' technical education!

BSEE - Building Services and Environmental Engineer: University improves practical skills

Read this carefully: this is documentation of a grant to the "Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University" to install a heliodon, an artifical sky and other 'advanced' equipment such as has been used by architecture and building science students at Victoria for the past 30 years.

The Director of the new 'ArchiLab' is quoted as saying: "The days in which architecture students focused predominantly on the visual impact of buildings were long gone, Dr Pretlove said. “They are now required to give just as much thought to the wider specifications of a site and the environmental factors that might affect a final design." What is unclear is how the lab is supposed to take these tools and transfer their use from the educational environment into practice. This is an aspect of the use of these tools that is troubling: if they are genuinely to be incorporated into design on a regular basis in the educational process, what happens when a student moves into a practice 1000km away? Are they to fly in for each project? And this is ignoring the fact that an artificial sky is a cloudy climate device, and does not deal well with the mixed / dynamic skies of most temperate countries...

What about new developments in architects' and lighting professionals' understanding of dynamic daylight modelling? Where might programs like Ecotect or Energy+ or ESP-r fit in this mix?

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.

Buildings Fingered in NYC Carbon Inventory | News | Architectural Record |

Buildings Fingered in NYC Carbon Inventory | News | Architectural Record |
Report suggests buildings are ~85% of NYC greenhouse emissions... Guess they don't have many cows / sheep...

Top 25 Architecture Blogs listed at Eikongraphia

At this link: http://www.eikongraphia.com/?p=1395 you can find a list
of the architecture blogs that internet users consider the most
interesting - as assessed by looking at how many times people link to
them..

BLDBLOG )http://www.bldgblog.blogspot.com/) is number 1; Archidose
(http://www.archidose.blogspot.com/) is number 4...

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:

A load of rubbish - otherwise known as the eco-friendly homes of the future | Expat Living | Global | Telegraph

A load of rubbish - otherwise known as the eco-friendly homes of the future | Expat Living | Global | Telegraph

Great headline - but how long have these been around? Old news...

Still an Earthship in France could (just) be considered news.

Algorithms in Architecture

Algorithms in Architecture

Doing the Smart Geometry tutorials? Enrolled in the computer applications animation / scripting elective? This is for you. If only to learn the extreme visual pattern making end of the spectrum of R&D effort that parametric architecture offers.

omnispace: Architecture - a blog worth watching

omnispace: Architecture:

An odd collection of really interesting stuff. Mostly news items. Plenty of interesting links.

No suggestion as to the source. no apparent archives, No listing of the date when items were uploaded just an ambiguous time...

But, if this had an rss feed, worth watching. One is left wondering where all this interesting stuff is collected?

Open Architecture Network

About the Open Architecture Network | Open Architecture Network

Check out this web site. An attempt to re-write the rules on architecture / community / professionalism. Cannot yet see the shape of what might / might not be from this web site. Like many such efforts - it looks good - the idea has an underlying strength (facilitating sharing of resources to overcome adversity - improving the quality / sustainability of housing). But - you can hear the but in my writing? - but, I cannot see how a web site of this type can yet do anything useful? An idea - an app - in search of a use?

Now the organisation behind OAN - Architecture for Humanity - that's a different thing altogether. Check them out and the good ideas and intentions seem to be getting somewhere.

Tate Modern extension by Herzog and de Meuron

Despite opposition, Tate Modern extension wins the go-ahead: "



Another interesting / controversial building to visualise in the Digital-Craft course?

Revit Name Change Announced!

Eat Your CAD
I see on this Bentley/Microstation web site that there is a rumour floating around that Autodesk will change the name of Revit.

The announcement says: "Following the recent news that ADT has been renamed ACA (AutoCAD Architecture), and after careful consideration Revit is to be renamed from 1st April 2007 to ADT to avoid any “potential customer confusion”.

The explanation for this change is probably best found here.

Columbia Memorial Space Learning Center

A 'Space Learning Centre' is probably not a 'museum' in the conventional sense. But it is part of the whole museums as cathedral
notional paradigm shift in urban design.

Well worth a look to see if it is worth modelling.

Parrish Art Museum

A design that has already been scaled down to fit the budget and about which the Museum Director is quoted in this article as saying: “this is a very energetic, adventurous design and it needs somebody who’s far more energetic and adventurous than I am to see it through to the end.”

Another building with very large North Lights.

A Lego version of an Escher Picture

lego_ascending.jpg (JPEG Image, 640x705 pixels) Just for fun!

Mecanoo architects: NKPAC Foyer FLythrough

National Kaohsiung Performing Arts Center, Taiwan. Mecanoo architects.

46 Museums to model?

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.

museum plaza proposal

OMA Ny design proposal in a fascinating video exposition placing the building proposal in context. A very different 'view' than the one I quoted a few weeks back: http://digital-craft.blogspot.com/2007/02/eyesore-of-month-by-james-howard.html#links

Architecture on the Double - Second Life underwhelms

So there I was in Youtube looking at a couple of architectural links and this was listed as 'related'. A view of using second life for 'architectural design...

I am left hugely underwhelmed, as I was when I took the SL tour ... As I have noted in a previous post http://digital-craft.blogspot.com/2007/03/for-those-of-you-fascinated-by-prospect.html#links the hype about the number of users of SL seems to be just that - hype. This looks like the 'reality' is based on a seriously flawed view of what architecture is / might be. The environment is so diagrammatic, so lacking in atmosphere - charm - subtlety etc that I wonder whether it could ever be anything more than a toy... Simulationists could spend a lifetime exploring how to add light, sound air flow in manner that assisted understanding of the architectural environment, and still not succeed. Whether the work on hdr image viewing devices or auditory enhancement of visual images will be enough only time can tell. At present I prefer to focus on more directly useful and interesting material.

Architecture in Second Life Machinima

More Second Life toy architecture...

National Law Enforcement Museum Virtual Tour

A cheesy animation - 'state of the art' in 2006. An example of the walk thru as advertisement... This is what the Digital Craft animation course is specifically reacting against.

Another Gehry Building to Model?

The Building

Came across this building today. The images online at the Museum site are insufficient to construct a model from - but they come close. At the date of writing - the building is under construction. Oddly, the trace was not a search engine looking for architecture, but a news item on a general site noting Brad Pitt visiting the museum consruction site.

46 Museums to model?

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.

Grand Rapids Art Museum - a LEED Gold Building

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...

An Argument for continuing to use Flash:

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?

An unusual occurrence - an architect returns to 'complete' his design

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..

Several more museum plans to model...

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...

“Ozeaneum” German Oceanographic Museum

Behnisch, Behnisch and Partners have designed a building to house an Oceanographic Museum, apparently due for completion of construction in Straslund in 2008.

Also mentioned here and here.

Is a 'World Trade Center' a museum?

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!

Even (especially?) a Calatrava has neighbourhood issues

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.

Animation and Story Boards - Digital Craft - 26 March 2007

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...