Green energy: California poll ... (latimesblogs.latimes.com)

So, what would we find in New Zealand? 

Political gain trumps science? (check out this New Zealand political view of the science: http://www.act.org.nz/climate-change-policy - it will interest people not from New Zealand to discover the party that published this document sits at the cabinet table ...!)

Or perhaps 'New Zealanders are just gullible followers of the left wing press'? http://mediamatters.org/studios/video/201107200010. 

In checking out references to see if I could find two viewpoints on this issue I came across the main reason I thought Fox news was a brilliant satire when I first encountered it:

Headline from Fox website:

Pirates Swashbuckle Global Warming Alarmists

Original from the ABC website said this...:

Pirates disrupting climate change research

Green energy: California poll finds overwhelming support
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2011/07/global-warming-green-energy-california-poll.html?dlvrit=142898

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Another Website Ranking

Another Website Ranking
from Taptu's "Mixed Stream" stream

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Shared from Taptu | DJ Your News

Archidose publishes some interesting stuff. Most interesting of recent times has been their considered examination of what constitutes an interesting / useful blog / web page related to architecture, This is one.

The other is the top sites as calculated by Alexa in terms of actual links to the sites.

66 Most Popular Architecture Websites

66 Most Popular Architecture Websites
from Taptu's "Mixed Stream" stream

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Shared from Taptu | DJ Your News

As it says, the Alexa report of the architetcure web sites linked to most often - as reported by 'Archidose'.

Takasugi-an | OpenBuildings

Takasugi-an | OpenBuildings

Anyone fancy a truly sick treehouse...?

A Rapidly-Deployable Shade Structure

A Rapidly-Deployable Shade Structure

An application for Rhino/ grasshopper/generative components /design script?

Something (anything)instead of more blobitecture...

Seems to me it could be resolvable as a formula / explicit coding of constraints which is always the arcane part of parametric architecture.

Let's hope the competition attracts the explicit designer...

brute force collaborative » Elevating the Discourse: Chapels pt. 3

brute force collaborative » Elevating the Discourse: Chapels pt. 3

An essay in images - elevating concrete and light to the spiritual. Follow link and enjoy.

m

Nanjing Sifang Art Museum | OpenBuildings

Nanjing Sifang Art Museum OpenBuildings

Check out this building. If we were still doing the Digital Craft Museum modelling - I'd want to add this insane building to the list - just so we could explore the interior.

Personally, having visited the Kiasma building, I am prepared to give this folly the benefit of the doubt. Kiasma was uplifting and exciting - as well as a trick to model.

Guest Blog: Words, pictures, and the visual display of scientific information: Getting back to the basics of information design

Guest Blog: Words, pictures, and the visual display of scientific information: Getting back to the basics of information design

" Many examples come straight from Edward Tufte, the information design guru who put the serious study of infographics on the map, so to speak (the New York Times has called him the Leonardo da Vinci of Data)." - So why bother with a regurgitation of Tufte in @SCIAM?

Ghostly Developments Also Haunt Spain’s Banks - NYTimes.com

Ghostly Developments Also Haunt Spain’s Banks - NYTimes.com

Some (small) part of me wants to include this as a tourist destination... on some future visit to Spain

Buildings and Death Rays

Curved mirrors and the sun. As one newspaper noted, the old saw about what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas seems not true in this case. Love to know more detail however as stories of melted plastic bags and singed hair are quite extreme, even given the intensity of the Vegas sun.

Thanks Terri for pointing this out...

Apart from this spoof what is remarkable about this story is the lack of evidence. Youtube has a bunch of links all of which are people talking about the

issue. The melted plastic bag is the only proof offered. Not to doubt the local heating effect of the concave mirror, but singed hair and no burnt skin?

It seems the original story broke in the Las Vegas Review. Illustrated thus:

What I want to see is the video showing what happens. Not the cheap, sun glinting off the facade pic.

form beats function to a pulp: Architectural Record

Antoine Predock�s CLA Building in California May Be Demolished | News | Architectural Record

Emergent Design-Air Flow Analysis 1

I fully expected something with a title of 'Emergent design' to be at the very least Digital. It is after all spawned by studies of the digital and lead to "a theoretical framework... for investigating how choice of design methodology contributes to the success or failure of education reforms."

Instead it appears to be the use of a very large model and a cooling fan to study the potential for natural ventilation / wind driven air flow.

And so it begins?

I see on blueprint a reference to 'The World's First Printed Building'.

I'm not sure what to make of it. It seems like it is possibly just another of those 'because I can' exercises where the 'freedom' to create wildly free-form architecture is sufficient justification for the achievement that is documented.



It is - of course - a 'pavilion' so one does not have to deal with windows and other awkward questions like keeping out the rain. Still it is a major step forward from the machines that extrude concrete or that are outsize robots or that modularise everything that I have seen in past exercises of this type.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Sound the Trumpet: Music Museum Opening in Phoenix

http://archrecord.construction.com/news/daily/archives/091230musical_instrument_museum.asp




Possibly another modelling exercise?

Could well be a basis for an acoustic model as well..

m

Inserting a Google Earth Viewer into a web page / blog

This is a trial of the Google Earth Gadget. Link in the title of this to the online gadget which generates the code that inserts this viewer.

It is a model created in Autocad and imported into 3D Studio for a walk through animation back in 1993 by Nick Warring - a student employed by me as a Research Assistant at the time.. The goal was to use the walk through during meetings with the people in the neighbourhood when Victoria University School of Architecture was looking to move into a refurbished building. The top floor and the atrium were added to the existing building.

The building was made into a Google Earth model in 2005 and uploaded to the Google Earth Community. This was during Rachel Ryan's research Masters in Building Science which explored representation of data / information within a 3D digital environment. Part of Rachel's preliminary studies was to construct a 3D Google Earth model of the Wellington CBD. Unfortunately this has not seen the light of day for 3 years because the owners of the copyright cannot agree to making the model widely available.

Here is the School of Architecture in Vivian Street (grabbed from the file uploaded to the Google Earth Community in 2005):

Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy? - life - 17 June 2009 - New Scientist

Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy? - life - 17 June 2009 - New Scientist

"Life seems to be pursuing its own demise, moving Earth ever closer to the day it returns to being sterile"

Shared via AddThis

NYT writes: Renzo Piano Embraces Chicago

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

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

Check out these links: 

NYT

ARTINFO

InteriorDesign.net

BBSC 303 Lecture / Workshop

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

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

Specific example issue:

Export reliably to LightStudio:

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

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

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

Use Max efficiently:

NOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

BBSC 303 Lecture, 19 May 2009

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

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

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

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

Finaly, it was noted with respect to Light Studio:

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

BBSc303 Lecture, 5th May 2009 - Sam Curtis

3dsmax mental ray Setup Workflow  (similar workflow lightstudio, different daylight systems and materials)

1) Setup your units. Make sure you are working in real world units.

2) Import your model (via FBX for Revit). Check the units (Measure tool under the tools tab)

3) Create a Arch & Design (mi) 'matte' material (from the template), 50% grey. Apply to the entire scene.

4) Hide the glazing in your windows, or create a Arch & Design (mi) 'Glass: Thin Geometry' material (from the template)

5) Create a Daylight system. Say yes to both questions when asked.

6) Make sure the Compass Rose is not too big, and do not drag the daylight system out too far from the scene. Keep it small,just twice as high as your buildling.

7) Setup the correct location for the daylight system. Change the day and time to something suitable.

8) Set up your camera views.

9) Go to Exposure settings and change exposure pre-sets to 'Physically Based Lighting, Indoor Daylight'

10) Bring up the render dialog box. Set render size to 320 x 240. Turn on finalrender and set to Draft. Set image anti-aliasing to Draft (Min 1/64, Max 1/4).

11) Render.

12) Adjust the sun position. Change the time in the daylight system until the sun is in the correct position. Re-render and repeat until satisfied.

13) Adjust your exposure. Go to Exposure settings and again and change the exposure setting (Exposure Value (EV)) and click Render Preview. Adjust the exposure setting until satisfied.

14) Create your materials for your walls and floor.
For gib painted walls create an Arch & Design (mi) 'matte' material (from the template) with 80% white. This is the reflectance value real white walls.
For a wooden varnished wall, use Arch & Design (mi) 'Satin Varnished Wood' material (from the template)

15) For the rest of the scene, use ony Arch & Design (mi) or ProMaterials. There are ProMaterial libraries you can load with a wider range of pre-defined realistic materials

16) When doing final renders, increase the render size, anti-aliasing the final render quality.

 

Useful Keyboard Shortcuts

F10  Render Dialog
F9  Re-render last
F12  Transform Type-in Dialog (move, rotate, scale)

M  Material Editor
H Object Selection
Q Select
W Move
E Rotate
R Scale
Alt-Q Isolate Current Object
Shift-W Turn off navigation wheel
Ctrl-D De-select current selection
Space Lock selection