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...