Matrix

Matrix for the gifting project, to the best of my understanding and "illustrator" ability

Completing the design

The exterior facade was completed, it was just modifying the interior left to do now. All the main ideas that I had been considering up to this point have directly influenced this end result. The several floors are connected by ramps and spaced apart to leave a hollow centre in middle of the building. I've also adjusted the diameter of the tubes differently to try and create smaller gaps on the side of the building where, for example, i'd want less light where the sun will hit, but larger gaps for the light to penetrate through in a different time of the day. This pattern is dispersed randomly, there isn't a specific reason as to why a specific space gets more light in the afternoon than the morning where instead a different space could have the same effect.

I don't imagine the varying quality of light to be dramatic, but me and my colleagues working routinely day by day will begin to notice the subtle differences, and I hope perhaps this may subconciously encourage the interaction between them during different parts of the day, where they want to stay away from the light and park on the sofa on the ground floor, or rejuvenate in the sunlight on a different floor.

Connecting

So now I've completed my original building, with slight renovations made to it. Me and Bennett agreed to connect our buildings together. His architecture firm would be a prime routine client for my virtual immersion pre-construction architecture business.

As for the modifications, I've looked back on my original focuses on the earth formations in antelope canyon and the investigation in my stop motion on the revolution of the sun in the daytime. This led to me think about how some spaces maybe well-lit in the morning, but as the sun moves towards midday and the afternoon the angle of the sunlight can cause these spaces to become much more dim lit, whereas spaces that may have been previously dark would receive maximum sunlight. With the interior spaces spread around the building both laterally and vertically, different colleagues can be 'gifted' the natural light at different times of the day.

An idea I very much like, although somewhat hard to experiment and prove on such a program as second life...

Developing Developing

This external structure is taking up most of my building time: getting the right position of each prim, locking them in place, changing the angle etc etc I've had no time to consider my interior work, besides playing with textures and colours

But if I am looking at the gift of light, something I consider while I build is whether to be presented with the gift of light first you must become aware of the amount of light in a space. Maybe I could control this by the size of the gaps made by the external facade, and where these gaps in relation to the interior space..

Starting on Second Life

It's been a whole semester since I've properly built on this programme again, but wasn't long before all the shortcuts flash backed to me. The idea was to renovate the building around the new idea of the gifting if light, but to renovate it I first had to construct the original building. Although the only space I found large enough for my building was on the kaiako-side of the tallest mountain... since I had to adjust the architecture to suit the new topography I had already started renovating.

It started with pancake-levelling of the base floors, just to set a general shape for the facade to follow and also to give me a visual guide later on. Ian suggested I play around with floor height and placement, not to make something generic. That's a thought I'm keeping in the back of my mind as I'll start to renovate.

The main holdback so far has been the amount of time it takes to position each prim in relation to another, getting it just right involves a lot of angle work as well as movement. But moreso has been the lack of available prims - the region has a set limit for how many prims there can be. Since all the projects from the last few groups as well as past projects from last semester and even last year are present, there's not a lot of space left.

Also noticed that Bennett (BigFudge) is building very close to mine, could be an opportunity to connect later on

From Annabel's earthform texture I was inspired to look at natural canyon formations that occur in America. I specifically researched the rock formations that create walkable shallow canyons within the crust. Because of the thick layers that stack and curve around the gaps, very little light shines through, and as the sun moves throughout the day the angle of approach continuosly changes which is interesting because certain areas that we're shadowed for the entire day are lit up, and areas that have been lit for the most of the day can become cold and sheathed in the afternoon.

Jump to 2:02 to see the amazing formations that I'm talking about


Here's another video, although not as good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJF-sEh7hjA&feature=related

Sculpted Prims and trading

Importing the sculpted prim into second life I still had several choices to make: what texture to apply onto it, and what motion script to apply to it to relate it to some aspect of my stop motion.

The texture i chose was a blank texture with very high shininess and a slight glow with a suction bumpiness, resulting in a material not unlike the facade tube-like structure in my motion design. I wanted it to relate somehow physically back to my building, because I realised that the object was more furniture and less architectural, and needed some relation to my personal building.

The Motion was a little trickier. The aspect of gifting i was looking at specifically was the gift of light. So it was appropriate to reflect on the motion directly at the end of my video, where I investigate the effect the sun has on my building throughout the day, in terms of shining through the gaps and creating different qualities of light (by varying the amount of light shing through the gaps depending on the angle of the sun to the facade). So I modelled that - replicating the sculpted prim and applying a slow rotation script. The one above rotates at half the rate to the one below, more interesting that having them rotate at the same rate. It also brought more attention the direct relation they have on each other, also as they rotate in opposite directions, outlining that inverse relation the sun + shadows have on each other (as the sun moves anti-clockwise, the shadows repliacte the movement but clockwise).

After displaying all our sculpted prims on the red carpet we had to trade our prims with each other. Several avatars requested permission to use the rotating piece, so I set it on so that anyone may be able to use it. I was most fascinated in Annabel's wall sample piece (second photograph, sculptie on the right), especially because of the texture, that I want to investigate into later