This week was mainly about adding elements and arranging them in the virtual exhibition space that I have replicated. That being said the tutorial watching has been minimal this week. It’s been a lot of importing, positioning, and parenting objects as well as creating material groups in order to allow for different materials to apply to single mesh objects. I’d say that with the exception of some various furniture elements I’m pretty close to having everything I want in my scene there and material creation is coming up next. The most time consuming part of this weeks progress has been the cloth simulations for curtains. Since there are objects that “hold” the curtain in place in the scene I needed to work with multiple collision objects and it created additional calculations that slowed down the process significantly. Additionally, there are two instances of curtains in the main “hall” and it’s been a challenge to get them to be aesthetically consistent. While, I believe I’m close, this is the task for the next few days since I want to be working on materials beginning next week.
Here are some progress shots for how everything is coming together. I know the wall vinyl is supposed to go last but I wanted to get the entryway finished and it was exciting to see what it could have looked like in real life (well if I had the best vinyl application skills in the universe!)
In order to stay sane while modeling, I ventured around the internet to see what is new in the world of art and technology. I found some pretty cool stuff that I think could be utilized by many individuals in the EDP community.
AR to Photoshop:
Lately, I have been doing some AR client work so this is an area of technology that I’m learning more about, which means things like this are becoming more prominent in my various feeds. This interesting workflow is in development by Cyril Diagne, who is an artist/programmer currently at the Google Arts residency. Previously the head of the Media & Interaction Design program at ECAL/University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland. Currently, I don’t find myself using Photoshop that often to create many elements since I’ve always preferred the vector based workflow of Illustrator and the minimalist styles it’s better at creating. However, I feel like this tool would be very useful in a collage practice and could be a fun experiment to explore over the summer as I balance getting outside and trying to keep myself busy at home in a post quarantine society. I’m curious if you could take old photos and then “install” them into the Photoshop document later on. Here is the link to the github repo for anyone that’s interested. Cyril’s github in general is something to keep an eye on.
AI Informed Bricklaying:
Augmented Bricklaying from Gramazio Kohler Research on Vimeo.
Since this one is related to technology assisted fabrication I was immediately interested. While it looks like it is quite a tedious process, the results are visually stunning. Using computer vision this application is able to assist the builders in perfectly laying these bricks in a way that achieves what I assume is a predetermined pattern. I’m curious if a quicker way would be to fabricated guides that are 3d printed or CNC milled for each layer? Would probably only work on smaller scale projects so this might just be the best method for creating geometrically precise patterns. Very interesting idea and great application of augmented reality.
Gourds Grown in Vessel-Shaped Molds Become Reusable Cups and Flasks:
This one is just out there. Brookly based designer, Jun Aizaki’s latest design is a wonderful approach to creating sustainable and reusable vessels. I’m just amazed by the ingenuity of this idea and want to know how the designer even came up with it in the first place. Additionally, I don’t know much about how quickly gourds are able to grow but this could take a while, which is probably a part of the ideation process that I need to think about more since lately I’ve been a lot of about the immediate.
Also now just realizing the irony of my title and I feel like I’ll probably have to reference that somewhere, hmmm…..