Digital Futures Workshop Series

Pratt Institute

School of Undergraduate Architecture

V-Ray Rendering in Rhino 4

Location- HHN 308

Date + Time- 2010.04.03, 12:00-3:00pm

Requirements- Participants are required to bring a laptop with the following software installed:

Rhino 4.0 (SR7) & V-Ray for Rhino Plug-In (v.01.05.29), Photoshop CS3, Illustrator CS3

Description- The workshop will serve as an introduction to rendering with the V-Ray rendering plug-in for Rhino 4.  Participants will be introduced to the concepts and techniques required to effectively set up, develop, and successfully render geometry in Rhino 4.  Topics covered will include modeling, lighting, configuring options/settings, and post processing.  Emphasis will be placed on developing quick, reliable results while rendering with V-Ray in Rhino 4.

Workshop Outline:

User Interface, Navigation

-loading plug-in

-accessing the V-Ray toolbar

-Material Editor

-Settings

-V-Ray Frame Buffer (VFB)

Lighting

-Basic Lighting Concepts: Direct and Indirect Lighting (Global Illumination or GI)

-Types of Light Objects in Rhino and how to add them to a scene

-Adjusting Light Properties and Physical Camera Properties

Materials

-Understanding the Material Editor

-Adjusting Color and Transparency

-Adding /adjusting reflectivity

Rendering Settings

-Overview, speed versus quality

-Settings, Output, Gamma Correction, and VFB channels

-Primary Rendering Engine: Irradiance Mapping, important settings and guidelines

-Secondary Rendering Engine: Light Cache, important settings and guidelines

-Saving Images and Channels

Post Processing

-Adjusting rendered images in Photoshop, Color Correction

-Overlaying vector drawings from Rhino on top of a rendered image using Illustrator.

Digital Futures Workshop Series

Pratt Institute

School of Undergraduate Architecture

Revit Workshop Level I

Location- Higging Hall Auditorium

Date + Time- 2010.02.20, 12-6pm (w/ a 30min break @ 2:45pm)

Requirements- Participants are required to bring a laptop with Revit installed and an extension cord.

Description- This workshop will serve as a basic introduction to Autodesk Revit. It will cover the software history and will begin to open up how it is being used today in contemporary practices. This is geared for people that have little or no experience in BIM software and will serve as an introduction to some of the other Building Information Modeling courses that are available in the UG curriculum.

Conductor- Joseph Nocella

About- Autodesk Revit is Building Information Modeling software for Microsoft Windows, currently developed by Autodesk, which allows the user to design with parametric modeling and drafting elements. Building Information Modeling is a Computer Aided Design (CAD) paradigm that allows for intelligent, 3D and parametric object-based design. In this way, Revit provides full bi-directional associativity. A change anywhere is a change everywhere, instantly, with no user interaction to manually update any view. A BIM model may contain the building’s full life cycle, from concept to construction to decommissioning. This is made possible by Revit’s underlying relational database architecture which its creators call the parametric change engine. (text via wikipedia)

Brochure (pdf – 3950Kb)

Workshop Outline:

I. Introduction

II. BIM- Definition

III. Advantages of Working in a BIM Environment

IV. Current State of the Profession

V. Technology at SOM

VI. A Tour of the Tool

VII. Workshop

Workshop Files:

intro_levels

CAD background

Digital Futures Workshop Series

Pratt Institute

School of Undergraduate Architecture

Rhino Workshop Level II

Location- HHS 416

Date + Time- 2010.02.17, 7-10pm

Requirements- Participants are required to bring a laptop with Rhino 4.0 (SR7) installed and an extension cord.

Description- This workshop will serve as an intermediate lesson in developing surfaces in Rhino 4.  Participants will be exposed to differing approaches to generating surfaces with a focus on the particulars of continuity and curvature.  Topics covered will include lofting, sweeping, patching, creasing, and blending with in-depth tutorials on digital topography creation/manipulation and generating layouts for a laser cut site model.  Emphasis will be placed on creating a procedural understanding of generating and managing surfaces and polysurfaces in Rhino.

Workshop Outline:

Curves and Curvature

-quantifying continuity: Positional, Tangent, Curvature

-strategies to blend curves and surfaces

-analyzing curvature in 2d, 3d

-Workshop Tutorial 1: Periodic Table of Form,

adapted from article by Gray Holland of Alchemy Labs

Generating Site Topography

-Importing/Tracing a site drawing

-Extracting Loft Curves to generate Surface

-Generate the surface, resolving issues/inconsistencies

-Adding Detail: Roads, Existing Buildings, Landscape Elements

-Workshop Tutorial #2: Creating the digital site model

Generating Content from a Digital Site Model

-Generating a site drawing, the contour command

-Creating a laser file for a site model.

-Workshop Tutorial #3: Creating Site drawings and laser files from a digital site model

Workshop Files:

Download: Rhino Workshop Level 2 files.zip

Digital Futures Workshop Series

Pratt Institute

School of Undergraduate Architecture

Rhino Workshop Level I

Location- HHN 308

Date + Time- 2010.02.04, 7-10pm

Requirements- Participants are required to bring a laptop with Rhino 4.0 (SR7) installed: download demo

Description- The workshop will serve as an introduction to Rhino 4.  Participants will be introduced to the most elementary concepts and techniques needed to develop drawings and models in Rhino 4.  Topics covered will include interface, navigation, settings and configurations, 2d/3d curve geometry, surfaces, and solids.  Emphasis will be placed on creating a procedural understanding of the methods of generating content in Rhino 4.

Workshop Outline:

User Interface, Navigation, Settings, Standards

-interface

-mouse navigation/hotkeys

-layers/properties

-options settings (units, command aliases, line display settings, etc.)

-views and the construction plane

Creating Curve Geometry

-command prompt, coordinate input methods

-Reference Geometry: point, textdot, text

-Primitive Curves: line, polyline, rectangle, polygon, circle, arc, ellipse

-freeform curves:  curve, interpolated curve

-Curve modifiers: trim, split, intersect, divide, explode, join, fillet, chamfer, curve boolean, hatch

-Transformations: move, rotate (2d/3d), scale (3d/2d/1d), copy, array, array polar, mirror, group

-Workshop Tutorial #1: developing curve geometry in plan

Creating Surfaces and Solids

-Primitives: plane, box, cylinder, cone, sphere, torus, 4 point surface

-Surfaces Derived from Curves: extrude, revolve, loft, sweep1, sweep2, pipe

-Curves on Surfaces: Intersect, project, extracting Isocurve

-Surface/Solid Modifiers: trim, split, boolean union, boolean subtraction, boolean intersection

-Workshop Tutorial #2: developing 3d models from plan, section, elevation

Other Useful Tools

-generating high resolution screen captures

-generating 2d drawings from 3d views

-exporting to DWG, AI

-printing

Downloads:

rhino workshop level 1 tutorial files

COMMUNITY CENTER FOR AQUATIC SPORT AND LEISURE

PROGRAM SCENARIO
The Community Center for Aquatic Sport is a mixed use and Leisure facility housing Olympic swimming and diving pools, gymnasium, community areas, press areas and administrative spaces in which to serve as a social condenser and venue for water sport events and training. The facility will serve both local Borough competition events at the level of public and private schools, and regional events. The proposal will comprise 115,000 sq. ft. of enclosed space, and approximately 100,000 sq. ft. of outdoor space whose program will be developed during design. Potential programs include: on site water catchment, swimming areas, amphitheater, public plaza, park recreational space and play ground facilities, 160,000 square feet of Parking and Bus loading and unloading areas. This facility will become a premier aquatics community center for Brooklyn located on a 375,000 sq ft site in McCarren Park at the site of the McCarren Park Pool in Greenpoint Brooklyn. This public assembly space will provide a venue for both local city wide events as well as serve as an important community center for the Williamsburg/ Greenpoint area of Brooklyn. The facility will hold classes and serve as a field trip venue for the public (as well as private) school system, year around. In addition to the facilities function as a city destination for aquatic recreational sport the facility will house community facilities that serve the other leisure sport venues for McCarren Park and the Greenpoint /Williamsburg community.

SITE SCENARIO
McCarren Park in GreenPoint Brooklyn is bounded by the neighborhood of Greenpoint to the North and East, a traditionally Polish community now transitioning with an increasing influx of high end condominium development in advance of the proposed extension park redevelopment along the East River to the North, and by Williamsburg to the West which is currently home to the „Hipster Movement‟ along with upscale condominium development and gentrification after the original influx of artists seeking cheap industrial space formerly typical of this area, and finally by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the South. The site exists along an intersection in several urban Grids that developed from historical land parcels. The park land itself was the site of an undevelopable marsh and flood plane with tributaries that feed into the East River. McCarren Pool is currently an abandoned structure since 1984 when it became the site of extensive problems surrounding gang violence and drug sales that ultimately blighted the surrounding neighborhoods. It was the eighth of eleven New York City pools built during the depression through the WPA program, under the leadership of Robert Moses and Mayor La Guardia. It was said that Moses was an avid swimmer. Built in the summer of 1936 the McCarren Park Pool accommodated 6,800 swimmers of the 66,000 swimmers the eleven pools collectively accommodated. Until recently the pool has been used to accommodate music events after the influx of artists and „Hipsters‟ to the Williamsburg/ Greenpoint neighborhoods. Currently the primary monumental building has been Historically Registered and is under restoration with plans for a new pool.

Assets for Arch 302 SP10.

SYLLABUS

Arch 302 spr10_Final_10_01-12b Syllabus PDF > download

MODELS

Arch 302 McCarren Park Site Model Base> download

PROGRAM

Arch 302 Natatorium Program Template PDF> download

Arch 302 Program Templates Final> download

REFERENCE

Arch 302 Architecture of Watter +Humidity> download

Arch 302 Professional Consultants Guidelines V003 PDF> download

READERS

Arch302.04-Sarrach

Structure Form Movement > download

NetworksSwarmsMultitudesP1> download

NetworksSwarmsMultitudesP2> download

things themselves are lying > download

Notes: (Photo by Donald Miralle/Getty Images)

Screen-cast from Alex Roman that takes you through modeling, rendering and compositing in motion graphics (3dsmax, Vray, AfterEffects and Premiere.).  “A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already built spaces.” I am sure we will see many great things from him to come.

For more information on this project please visit thirdseventh.com/ + his vimeo page.

compositing breakdown

Based on the sinusoidal walls of Eladio Dieste, this study aims to analyze and compare the benefits gained by creating walls (and other structures) with varying degrees of sinusoidal profiles.

Background

The Church of Christ the Worker, located in Atlantida, Uraguay, was constructed between 1958 and 1960 from designs by architect/engineer Eladio Dieste.  The most striking feature of this church is the sinusoidal side walls — which are based on cosine waves mirrored across the center aisle, as shown in the schematic below.

Goal

The goal of this ongoing study is to create models based off of these sinusoidal walls and to compare them under a variety of loading scenarios.  Comparing models with varying degrees of “curviness” — which is mathematically controlled by increasing/decreasing the amplitude of the cosine waves — will provide insight into why Dieste would choose to use walls of this type.  Such double-curved designs recur in his works, and as an engineer, he informed these decisions based, at least in part, on the advantages that these shapes provided with respect to loading.

Description

I started this study by creating a small variety of shapes to “play around with” in SolidWorks.   Once I determined how I would proceed with the study, I went back and normalized all of the parameters so that valid comparisons could be drawn.  I first generated a surface by using two juxtaposed cosine waves as the top and bottom limits — the peaks of one cosine correlated with the troughs of the other, and vice-versa.  This surface was then thickened.  Six shapes were generated from this template — with cosine amplitudes of 0 (a flat, planar wall), 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, and 2.5.  They are all 24 inches tall and slightly more than 25 inches wide (8 pi, to be exact, since each has a period of 2 pi repeated 4 times).

I then applied a fixed set of conditions using COSMOSWorks.  For each model, I applied three different sets of restraints and pressure loads, all with a fixed value of 10psi compression: (1) bottom fixed and loaded from the top, (2) bottom fixed and loaded from the sides, and (3) bottom fixed and loaded from the top and the sides.  For those familiar with the software, this is done with a basic static analysis, using PVC as the material.  Each design scenario produces five graphs: stress, strain, deformation, displacement, and factor of safety.  Due to the comparitive nature of these analyses, the graph of interest is that of the stress analysis.

As part of the ongoing study, with excellent feedback from several instructors and professionals, more loading scenarios will be included, including changing the restraints (i.e. “real life” wall restraints on all sides) and the directions of the pressure loads.  There will also be analyses of several more shapes based on Dieste’s designs, including those with simple extruded cosine profiles instead of juxtaposed ones, and with different materials.

Completed Analysis Images

As it exists now, there is already a fairly large set of images generated.  I caution you to note that the scale of each image is slightly different (”blue” on one graph is not necessarily equal to “blue” on another).  The usefulness of these graphs as images is that they provide insight into where the shapes experience the highest levels of stress — mechanically, these areas are where the structures are the weakest from a load-carrying perspective.  The basis of the comparison lies in looking at the maximum and minimum stress values for each iteration, which will be catalogued for comparison at a future date.

I will begin with the planar case, and work in increasing increments.  For all cases other than the planar one, I included screenshots of both sides of the models — because the shapes are based on cosines, there are more full peaks on one side than on the other, thus creating a “preference” for bending in that direction.  In each image, the green arrows indicate which portion is fixed, and the red arrows indicate on which face the pressure load is being applied.  Blue represents the lowest stress levels, green the intermediate stress levels, and red the highest stress levels, as per the scale on the right.  The scale is difficult to read at the required image resolution, but it varies for each model.

Iteration 1: Planar

Iteration 2: Amplitude of 0.5

Iteration 3: Amplitude of 1

Iteration 4: Amplitude of 1.5

Iteration 5: Amplitude of 2

Iteration 6: Amplitude of 2.5

A Short Note

You can already begin to see, just visually, the effect that adding curvature has on the stress distribution.  Rather than being evenly distributed throughout the body (as in the planar case), the curvature concentrates the stress in the central, neraly planar area of the body.  For example, under the third loading scenario (bottom fixed, pressure from the top and from the sides), the planar body experiences a max stress of 18.4 psi, whereas the most curved model (iteration 6) experiences a max stress of 347 psi under identical conditions.  The planar body has an average stress of 9.7 psi, whereas the curved body has an average stress of 62.3 psi.  However, the curved body also has more places wherein the stress is equal to or lower than that of the planar body, as confirmed by probe sampling of those areas.  Will planar surfaces hold up better than curved ones to loads on the largest faces?  Discovering these kinds of trade-offs are the end goal of these studies.

Study by Gerard Delatour II originally posted on core.form-ula and was produced under the guidance of Neil Katz + Ajmal Aqtash in the Stevens PAE Skyscraper Design Studio

A simple, featherweight headset, a 10′ x 10′ x 10′ white room, and $600,000 worth of projector and computer equipment, combined with the smarts of the folks at Eon Reality, results in one insanely real experience.

The cave (or iCube, as we’re told they would prefer we call it) is comprised of three white walls and a floor, all about 10′ x 10′ in size. Onto each surface is projected a high-resolution, stereoscopic image. A viewer stands in the room wearing polarized 3D glasses — like you might use in a 3D movie — with small markers that stick out a bit from the frames.

The markers are illuminated by IR LED floodlights located on the perimeter of the room, and IR-sensitive cameras use those positions to determine the precise location of each eye within the room. From those positions, stereo images for each projector are calculated and rendered on the fly, and the result is absolutely amazing.

Text description from ideo labs + for more info visit labs.ideo.com

originally posted on core.form-ula

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

Polemics of a Cybernetic Future by Joseph Clarke

Never before has the hand of technology applied itself with such assiduity to the vital fabric of organic life. The mapping of the human genome, life-support machines that extend metabolic processes beyond brain death, industrial agriculture’s use of hormones and crop modification, humanity’s realization of our capacity to influence the planet’s climate, and countless other recent scientific developments have challenged our conceptions of nature and of ourselves in relation to it. Accompanying these advances has been a corresponding burgeoning of cultural artifacts exploring the technologization of organic life, from late-twentieth century pop phenomena like virtual reality, cyborgs, and vocoder-enhanced music to work by Roy Ascott, Tim Hawkinson, and other artists.

The robotic installations of Philip Beesley are an architectural investigation of the same themes. Beesley is an architect and co-director of the University of Waterloo’s Integrated Centre for Visualization, Design, and Manufacturing. His Orgone Reef (2003), Hylozoic Soil (2007), and Epithelium (2008) consist of numerous small mechanical components assembled into amorphous masses with emergent responsive properties. While his early installations were static textiles made of inert components, these more recent projects have incorporated sensors, microprocessors, motors, and shape-memory metal capable of generating movement in response to the presence and actions of spectators. Epithelium, whose name refers to an organic boundary tissue made of cells connected to form surfaces, was built by nine fourth- and fifth-year Pratt architecture students in a studio co-taught by Beesley and Richard Sarrach in Fall 2008. It was a lattice of tongues, whiskers, and tendons made of wire, acrylic, vinyl, and mylar – over 50,000 components in all – suspended from a cable structure. As visitors moved around and through the installation, tiny motors meant for cell phone vibrators brought it to “life” with an animal-like awareness.

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

Attempts to give architecture the qualities of organic life are by no means new. Animals have been adopted as metaphors for architectural form since at least the Renaissance, when Leon Battista Alberti compared part-to-whole relationships in buildings with the proportions of living creatures. Countless 20th century architects were influenced by D’arcy Thomson’s On Growth and Form and its conception of morphogenesis through mathematically describable transformations. In the late 90s, Greg Lynn’s call for “animate form” proposed new digital methods by which architecture could use the metaphor of the animal to configure the built environment, structuring the relationship between human subject and inorganic milieu.

Instead of mimicking the formal structures of living things through the mediation of visual representation, however, Beesley is more concerned with modeling organic systems of behavior—processes of “communication and control,” to borrow a phrase from the cyberneticists of the 1940s and 50s. This approach is indebted to designers like R. Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes, Dymaxion prototypes, and other inventions were conceived not as self-contained formal compositions but as components integrated organically in a broader “ecosystem” of technology. One consequence of this approach is the relative unimportance of graphic images in Beesley’s design process. While architects have long tested ideas through visionary renderings and drawings, his experimentation is carried out through the production of actual fabricated prototypes; indeed, when I visited the studio at Pratt on a typical work day, the walls were comparatively bare of architectural representations, and the students were busy designing through physical construction. This work is not meant merely to be looked at, but rather to act directly on the human occupant, evoking instinctive emotional responses.

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

But an emotional stimulus is itself a kind of representation, and, like any representation, can be shown to express a particular ideological orientation. Beesley says that his work is motivated by a desire “to find strategies for thriving in complex interconnected ecosystems,” and speaks of a post-Enlightenment attitude of the human being in relation to the environment. His installations aim to shed light on the mingling of nature and technology by modeling new forms of subjectivity associated with it. The realization that an organism’s life is bound up with its milieu is a product of late 18th century zoology and the nascent science of biology; well into the 20th century, however, architecture continued to accord the human organism the privileged stance of the Cartesian subject, a rational occupant of a submissive exterior world. The Bauhaus radicalized the human subject’s isolation from the environment by reducing objects to technical elements of a potentially infinite, analytic system.

Beesley’s work, by contrast, attempts to challenge the occupant’s sense of self-possession by evoking the uncanny. His earlier installation Hylozoic Soil—named for hylozoism, the belief that matter is alive—inspired a sense of uneasiness as its pores breathed and rippled in response to motion. Epithelium was similarly unnerving: as the spectator walked between skeletal columns and vaults, tiny whiskers began to wave and the whole installation started to rustle and hiss. The computer that controlled the installation was distributed, simultaneously processing the input of many sensors in multiple locations (the system is called Arduino, and was implemented with the help of the MIT Media Lab). The result was a biomimetic environment whose lifelike behaviors implicitly threatened to “depersonalize” the occupant by blurring the lines between human life, animal life, technology, and environment.

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

The paradox is that an actual splicing of biological and technological life would change the conceptual structure of the image to such an extent that all our impressions of cybernetic existence—Beesley’s robotic fantasia included—would be completely invalidated. As the philospher Elizabeth Grosz writes in her essay “Future, Cities, Architecture,” the predominant effect of recent technological advances has not been “to transform bodies in any significant way—at least not yet—but to fundamentally transform the way that bodies are conceived, their sphere of imaginary and lived representation.” This observation undoubtedly holds true for organicist architecture. Even Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, though ostensibly motivated by structural and ecological concerns, is remembered because of its symbolic potency, its polemical insistence on the altruistic potential of science in a postatomic world embroiled in social struggles. It was no less a representation than the sci-fi environments inhabited by robotic denizens like Blade Runner’s replicants and Star Trek’s Borg, which presented dystopian pictures of the intersection of architecture and life.

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

Epithelium poses a more nuanced challenge to architecture’s traditional conception of the human subject than either of these examples. Here, technology’s infiltration of the organic—so familiar today in the form of genetic research, biotechnology, and climate science—is presented neither as a transcendent savior nor as a maker of monsters. Anti-humanist overtones are combined with an essentially affirmative (even romanticized) view of scientific development, and biological functions are characterized in cybernetic terms. At times, the installation’s robotic limbs seem strangely anthropomorphic, as though the technologized environment were reaching out to join hands with its human occupant and welcome an oncoming future of prosthetic interdependence. Not everyone will agree with this outlook, but perhaps that’s the point: If Beesley’s work is able to help us “find strategies for thriving in complex interconnected ecosystems,” it is by confronting us with the tangled web of representations that is the contemporary discourse about nature, science, and design. By questioning the occupant’s sense of self-possession, it underscores the limits of the human body in a world where technology threatens it with obsolescence; by defamiliarizing the built environment, it reminds us that all architecture has a life of its own.

Epithelium image courtesy of photographer Mark Mahaney

References

Beesley, Philip, Sachiko Hirosue, and Jim Ruxton. “Toward Responsive Architectures” in Responsive Architecture: Subtle Technologies 06 (Toronto: Riverside Architectural Press, 2006)

Caillois, Roger. “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” Minotaure 7 (1935)

Dery, Mark. “The Persistence of Industrial Memory” in ed. Amerigo Marras, Eco-Tec: Architecture of the In-Between. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999)

Grosz, Elizabeth. “Futures, Cities, Architecture” in Architecture from the Outside (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001)

Ingraham, Catherine. Architecture, Animal, Human: The Asymmetrical Condition (New York: Routledge, 2006)

Mertins, Detlef. “Bioconstructivisms” in ed. Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004)

Scott, Felicity. Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007)