In December last year I worked closely with Dos Architects to develop their competition entry to design a church in Lagos Nigeria.

This was an exciting project for me to be involved in concept development working closely with Dos Architects and the engineers AKT to produce something that we feel is a great result.

Today World Architecture News have published an article on the project.

It was important that although our design was quite contemporary it was still derived from traditional adn scacred features of a Catholic Church, such as incorporating a cross in the plan to form the Chancel, Transept and Nave,  and including architectural features such as a modern interpretation of the flying buttress to create aisles.

Also, it was important for us that design was easily constructed and maintained by building methods and resources local to it’s location in Lagos Nigeria.

Grasshopper and Rhino.

We developed the concept using Grasshopper and Rhino 3D, an analytical design solution that enabled us to manipulate the design real-time just by altering two lines that defined the canopy.

The structure would then be updated analytically using key parameters such as the arch spacing and aisle width. This meant that we could visualise our changes immediately without having to go back and rebuild the entire model, enabling us to get feedback over design changes much quicker than when using traditional design techniques.

This program was then developed over the project program to make more and more of the design driven by this analytical solution.

Rendering.

We felt that the interior of the church needed special attention to the quality of light. The main window features special glass of varying thickness that represents the sun, with rays emanating from the alter area. Maxwell render provided us a solution to simulate this with great effect.

Design by DOS Architects and Joshua Newman.

Illustration by Joshua Newman and Dimitar Karanikolov from meshroom.

meshroom is honoured to have been selected to have a couple of images in the new book, ‘Inspirato’ from 3DATS. No-one really knew what to expect from the book, and even some were quite tough on the team behind it on CGArchitect despite all of their hard work.

I’ve got a copy of it on my desk and not only is the work inside inspirational, but the quality of the book is superb. Well done to Brian Smith and the rest of the team that have been working on it.

Anyway, to the task at hand. I will be attending the EUE again this year, Joep and Michiel did a great job last year, I really enjoyed it and would hate to miss it. Hopefully I will see you all there.

http://eue.3dstudio.nl/

Here are some of meshrooms projects that show the difference before and after our post production stage. We’re now being asked more and more to do the post production on our clients images to bring them up to scratch.

There is a lot of competition from companies offering extremely cheap services at the moment. In the middle of a recession it is very tempting for a business to look at cutting costs, and that often means choosing a cheaper supplier for some of your goods. This is no good for us, as being based in London we cannot compete with the cost of services that companies from China and Argentina are offering. In fact, it’s not uncommon for me to clear my inbox of emails from companies in far away places offering to do my work for prices that I can’t even get out of bed for.

Also, many architectural practices are turning to using people in house to do their rendering for them. These people are already on staff, and may not have much else to do anyway, and although their skills are not as good as out sourcing they’re quite acceptable considering the money they save. You just have to look through Building Design to see it flooded with low quality images that appear to have been done on the cheap.

Many of our clients are doing this, but they’re finding that often the quality is not good enough, or maybe that the visualisation company didn’t really understand what had to be done and therefore a full time employee had to spend a lot of time communicating with them to get the job done, or even that after a certain stage they refuse to make revisions to the images anymore.
This is producing an interesting effect for us, we find that more and more we are asked to fix a rendering done by another company and asked to bring it up to scratch.

We use these techniques in our everyday work, as these examples will show you. Sometimes the renderings are OK but it is in the post production that they really begin to sing.

I’ve been working with UK street artist Ronzo to animate his character designs for German company aka-aki mobile location networking game.

aka-aki are developing the application and got Ronzo on board to design the characters. I worked with Ronzo to develop and render the 3D for the game and also with aka-aki to produce 3d for the video. It’s great to be involved with people producing great stuff, and anyway it’s my first iphone title.

Dimitar has been hard at work capturing a typical day in the studio with time lapse photography. We’ve edited this to remove some of the boring parts (work) and more of the fun stuff (table football and a Friday after work beer).  Shot with a 5DmkII EF 16-35mm at ten second intervals.

As a modern day 3D artist I need to mix both the left and right sides of the brain. It might have seemed inconceivable twenty years ago that maths and computer coding would play such a large of modern day art and illustration.
I’ve been experimenting with papervision and 3D Flash recently, and while most action script guru’s are trying to get their heads around 3D I’m coming from the other side and blinking my weary eyes at action script. No fear, there is some progress in a straightforward application of interactivity on a architectural project that is geometrically pure, the Palace of Peace.

It’s always nice to see your images published. Here is a link to the Irish Times which features an image that we at meshroom recently completed for NBBJ London. I worked with our team, in particular Dimitar Karanikolov and Nedyalko Nedyalkov, to complete the image for a design in it’s early stages for the architects NBBJ.

Article here, here and here.

- Introduction.
- Optimizing the scene explorer.
- Creating an advanced layer system in 3ds Max 2010.
- Conclusion.
- Other useful scene explorers.
- Autodesk on containers.

Introduction.

In 3ds Max 2010 the team at Autodesk have introduced containers. These nifty little things are useful for many things including;

- working with others in a collaborative work flow by saving containers to separate files,
- saving system memory by only loading the end result of the modifier stack of objects inside the container,
- enhancing viewport performance by caching the final model in the container.

What they haven’t told us (but they have hinted) is that using containers and the scene explorer together gives us an advanced nested layer system. We can customise a scene explorer to show containers, get rid of the stuff we don’t need and we now have an advanced layer system.

Optimizing the scene explorer.

Autodesk have also greatly improved the performance of the scene explorer system since it’s humble beginnings in 2008. We can further improve it’s performance by removing unnecessary columns from it’s interface. I have removed the extra revit columns from the selectbyname interface to make it more usable.

Creating an advanced layer system using containers.

Let’s make a custom scene explorer to replace our layer manager.

- Create a new scene explorer; tools | new scene explorer

- Make sure that sync selection is activated from the selection toolbar (this is optional)

- Remove all the visible toolbars; scene explorer | customize | toolbars

- Activate the containers toolbar; scene explorer | customize | toolbars

- Remove all the obsolete columns by dragging them down into the blank space

- Add any columns you would like maybe; colour, hidden, frozen, and display as box. Just remember that the fewer columns we have the better the performance; customize | configure columns

- Open the manage scene explorers dialog; tools | manage scene explorer

- Rename your scene explorer and click save and save it under the folder ‘autoload’. This will make it always available under the saved scene explorers list under the Tools drop down list.

Conclusion.

This is our new layer interface. Now we have access to a variety of controls to manage our containers. We have all the features from the scene explorers interface, dragging and dropping objects, editing object names and the rest. We also have all the new benefits of using containers. If you like, you can unload them or save them out to disk to improve performance and make them available to other users, or we can leave as they are embedded in the max file.

Other useful scene explorers.

I’ve also created a couple more useful scene explorers. One to replace the old light lister which is pretty defunct, and I’ve used maxscript to expand the scene explorer interface to list cameras features so I can create a camera lister as well. Currently this lists only standard max camera features.

Download three scene explorer presets here, containers, light lister, and the enhanced camera lister. To install, just drop the file in your max viewport.

Autodesk.

This is an excerpt from the Autodesk New Features guide, which can be found here.

The new Containers toolset in 3ds Max facilitates collaboration and flexible workflows by enabling users to collect multiple objects of a complex scene into a single container. Place related objects―such as sections of a city―in a container and treat them as a single element. To improve scene performance, temporarily unload containers from the viewport display while maintaining their relationships to the scene and reload later when needed―saving memory, increasing viewport performance, and decreasing load and save times. Translate, delete, copy, or save container nodes; use containers to override object properties for scene organization without affecting layer organization (similar to a nested layer workflow); and reference multiple containers created by others into a single scene so users can work together in context. Users can access and edit each other’s container, allowing flexible workflows while also imposing constraints on what can be edited.