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

Sculpting an object for Second Life

The next task was to sculpt an object (section of a wall, floor, furniture etc) from our stop motion building in 3DS studio max. I sculpted a hypothetical coffee table for 4, and chose to capture the general motion of my video in the design of the table/chairs. To me the video was somewhat smooth flowing, a mixture of timelapse sections and stop motion animations.

This was my second time using 3Ds studio max. To get the program fully working i also had to download a plug-in for sculpting prims from this website: http://maniacsl.blogspot.com/2011/02/basic-installation-of-prim-composer.html, as it doesn't come with the program. After a few short youtube tutorials, i finally got a grip of how to use it. Reflecting back on the smooth, flowing motion of the video, i sculpted a prim where the chairs are flowing out through the bulk table centre

The end result was seemingly random, but you could still make out the chairs and the table. I then uploaded the element into second life by converting it into a red,blue and green png image

FLAXTIVE architecture

Flaxtive - that's the word I'd use to describe my building. The flax-like weave of the tubes that reflect light in different directions, disorientating both light and the viewer. The -tive is to create an adjective, but was originally from merging the two words - Flax and reflective - together.

Just experimenting with prim composer on Autodesk 3DS Studio Max, playing with sculpting and then exporting through an image. This image can be used to recreate a 3D object, by reading each different colour as well as each colours co-ordinates. Nifty

Gifting

The new topic for Project four is 'Gifting'. We discussed the idea of 'gifting', what is it? When and where more specifically, is it done? Gifting presents, to giving the gift of knowledge, or even life through birth, or saving another life. Even moreso, sacrificing your life for another.

But what was more important is to relate these ideas to architecture. What does a building gift to us? How does it provide us with the means to gift, to encourage the idea of gifting and sharing? Although of course in a more indirect and subtle manner, architecture can give us protection and security, freedom, or even the direct opposite (think prisons, courtrooms etc). This is all part of what we discussed today.

Architecture also provides the means for humans to give and gift. A meeting room, an exhibition space, a lecture hall, a classroom, all these different types of architecture and predetermined for their own specific purposes in function to be optimal for gifting of knowledge, creative skill etc. If we dive deeper we can analyze what about these rooms encourages that gifting: the arrangement of tables in a classroom, the form of the interior as the result of acoustics in a lecture hall, the subtle forceful direction and implication of the corridors and attention brought to a piece of art in an exhibition. One thing that largely fascinated me was light. The amount of light in a room can receive different reactions of mood from humans, just as the colour of the light can invoke various emotions. Dim, artifical lighting sets the mood for the exchange of romance and love; bright natural sunlight promotes gifting of knowledge.

Of course the gift of light, is like the gift of vision to a blind man.



The gift of light:

The small canadian town of Inuvik goes through several weeks a year without any sunlight. Children still attend school at night, people still shop for their groceries, and the routine of a normal sunny day is still imposed. The american juice company Tropicana gifted a large artifical helium sphere of light to the people of Inuvik, along with 1200 bottles of free juice. The sphere acted as a small sun to the town, and was created in time to celebrate the sunrise festival which celebrates the return of the sun after the short period of continuous night.

Finished A1 Paper Animation

Gathering Stop Motion Animation

This is the complete video of the stop motion animationg for the gathering topic. I Will post pictures of the finished copy soon, as well details of the project and its development

Developing the design

At this point I'm stuck on how to continue my development of the design. So I decided to revisit my previous projects again as well as my matrix project, the New England house by office dA. I drew up a series of patterns and wrote up relevant ideas portrayed by the house, in an effort to merge the ideas together.

I liked the idea of reflection in my sustenance project, especially because there isn't any still texture, such as the grains on a wooden table, or the rough grey on concrete. The texture instead comments on all the textures around it, both still and moving. Was wondering if my entire building's exterior was made of mirrors, it would be amazing. It would almost certainly blend in with the background sky, and that's when i thought of the incredible 'cloud gate' in chicago. The smooth curve and reflectiveness of the bean gives an image of an augmented reality. The edges blend with reality but then obscure the images in the centre, distorting the space behind as well as the space it consumes. This is a perfect idea for my project...

Elaborating the function

To elaborate and develop the idea of this 'virtual box' I started thinking about the practicality and design of it, because ultimately the function of the building and its purpose will almost certainly define its aesthetic, so it seems ideal to research this aspect. I figured being inside a virtual 'box' one would not be able to move around the virtual space, only have the space move using another feature such as vocal or hand gestures. But this would remove another element of reality - using your legs - and therefore again remind you that you are in fact in a virtual world and not one that's real. I want my clients to be fully immersed into their architecture, to have static images gives only a very tiny portion of it.

Another design idea I included was that of reaction space - whereby specifically pointing to or trying to touch a surface one could zoom into it and get a full 3-dimensional view of the texture, or stroke their hand against it to hear what it would sound like in real life. Generally something along those lines...

The final result was a large Sphere that I'd situate directly in the centre of the building, where one can walk and roll the sphere to walk around the virtual world, like a guinea pig exercise wheel.

Ideas I'm considering:
Having the sphere sitting on the bottom floor but protruding high to the second floor, and all other floors having circular openings directly above the sphere so that's its visible from above.

Like russian dolls creating a-sphere-within-a-sphere effect, a geometrically appealing effect, the bigger sphere being the exterior of the actual building.