student needs ideas

[marchitecture]

I am a beginner in viz and i am trying to model a skin similar to that on the seattle public library by Rem Koolhaas and i do not believe that with one week left, that I have time to detail the skin to present my building on a board. I am an architectural student and I need advice on possibilities for modeling and rendering this skin. It is made of triangular planes that span nonorthogonal directions. These planes are made of smaller diamond shapes of glass and I beams. I am thinking of rendering the structural skin similar to the renderings of the architect Predoc( a ghostlike blanket), If anyone might know of possibilites on how to build this skin and with one week left, how detailed should i get. thanks, here is a link to a site to see the precedent.http://www.arcspace.com/architects/koolhaas/Seattle/

[Ismael]

It usually helps to provide a picture or a link for those not familiar with a subject but that may still provide imput.

 

http://www.arcspace.com/architects/koolhaas/Seattle/

 

Ismael

[AJLynn]

I think this would be easy to model in Sketchup... or Rhino... harder in Viz. If I were doing it I'd roughly outline the walls in Sketchup then make a component for a few modules of the wall, repeat it, explode them and clean it up in the areas that will be close to a camera. Then bring it into Viz and render it up.

[Eamon]

marchitecture:

if you intend to model the skin in detail, showing how the triangles are composed of steel sections, maybe consider downloading the 3ds max 8 demo and using the new "sweep modifier":

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=5903856

For each of the planes of the skin, just construct a grid of these triangles that koolhaas uses, composed of polylines in autocad, or I guess splines in 3ds max or viz, and position each plane in xyz space, then apply the sweep modifier. Hopefully you can understand without the aid of pictures.

As regards rendering the skin, maybe you don't have much time to perfect the transparency, translucency and reflective qualities of cg-rendered glass, as well as being able to afford the heavy render times needed for reflections etc - perhaps render the skin separately and composite in photoshop, using various layer modes. I hope this is helpful; just saw this post in passing. Finally, try this post

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=6976

Eamon

[AJLynn]

Or do the modeling in Autocad, you could just draft an orthographic view of that geometric pattern and a pline around it, region the pline and all of the diamond shapes. Make copies in place on another layer of all the diamonds, using one copy of all the dianomds, subtract the diamonds from the pline shape and bam, you've got the shape of the mullion parts. Extrude that ... what is it, 8 inches maybe? ... and extrude the remaining set of diamonds 1/4 inch to make the glass panes (put them on another layer). Now import the whole thing to Viz. You could make a decent size panel of the stuff, then assemble everything in Viz using copies and booleans. That would be very fast.