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...
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.
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.
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...
Concepts covered in class today:
Global Illumination and Final Gather in Mental Ray
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...
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.
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. 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?
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 |
Report suggests buildings are ~85% of NYC greenhouse emissions... Guess they don't have many cows / sheep...
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...
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?
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
Great headline - but how long have these been around? Old news...
Still an Earthship in France could (just) be considered news.
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:
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?
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.
Despite opposition, Tate Modern extension wins the go-ahead: "
Another interesting / controversial building to visualise in the Digital-Craft course?
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.
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