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.