It’s on again. Tomorrow I leave for Utrecht and the End User Event.
I cannot stress how useful this event has been for me in the past as a way to meet other artists and professionals and to keep up to date with the 3D industry.

*** UPDATED *** 04/07/2011 ***

Well I am back after a whirlwind tour of Utrecht. This conference is truly great just in it’s concentration of real talent. All of the speakers are approachable on a one to one basis and I’ve had the chance to talk with many architectural visualisation guys such as Vyonyx and Luxigon, and also met new guys like Lukasz Gradzki from renderare. Outside of visualisation I’ve also had the chance to meet 3D celebrities like Bobo (no introduction needed) not to mention some great 3D talent like Mike Meron from Analog and Rune Spaans of Troll Hunter fame. I will definitely be attending again next year.

Recently we at meshroom completed a set of visuals for Zaha Hadid’s design for the Iraqi Prime Ministers Headquarters. It was a fast paced project and called for something special.

We were provided with good high resolution models that we then spent time adapting to our needs before moving onto the environments and creating key buildings from photographic reference and building a suitable replica of the city.

The clients brief called for aerial images which always require much more work in term of the landscape and the surrounding context.

An article on milimet.com discusses Foster + Partners entry into the design for a masterplan in Sofia, Bulgaria. Our work is featured heavily and also displayed integrally as part of a wider presentation.

An article also appears on e-architect.co.uk containg the same visuals and animation.

It’s nice to be published. 100 Global Architectural Schemes have published two architectural projects that we have work on with DOS Architects, Lagos Church and the Taipei Performing Arts Centre. We didn’t win either of the compeitions but there were great projects to be involved in.

It’s been quite a while between posts, We have been quite busy here and I hope that we can get some more work up soon.

Hi it has been a long time since I have posted anything, but I wanted to show Ronzo’s video – The making of Crunchy, the credit monster. Please see Ronzo’s site for more information. I’m lucky enough to get a photography credit for what seems to me a small contribution to a large amount of work. Great work Ronzo!

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/

ramRender will load both the previous render and the new render into the Ram Player for easy comparison. ramRender is written in Maxscript and is compatible with Max 2009 upwards.

*** Beta ***

Download the ramRender script here

Changelog:
 - 24/08/10	RamRender no longer disables the RFW.
 – 11/05/10	unleashed unto the world!

ramRender is intended as a tool to enable you to compare two version of a rendering. Simply click the ramRender button to activate, and it will then monitor the renderer. When you next hit render, the current image in the Render Frame Window (RFW) will be stored, and then displayed in the Ram Player together with the new rendering. You can then slide the splitter left and right to see the difference between the two renderings.

Features.

To access the options panel, hold Shift and click the ramRender button.

‘monitor renderer’ – This indicates that ramRender is monitoring the renderer. Toggle the toolbar button to turn this on or off.

‘remember current render’ – Activate this, and ramRender will remember the image in the RFW and always display this in the left channel of the Ram Player.

‘load image file’ – Click this button to choose an image to load into the left channel of the Ram Player instead of a rendering.

Installation.

1. drop the mzp package onto the 3DsMax viewport

2. press the button ‘install ramRender’

3. close the installer window

4. right-click the toolbar and choose ‘customize’

5. choose the category ‘JN scripts’

6. drag the script ‘When active RamRender…’ onto your toolbar, perhaps next to your render button

7. re-start Max

You can un-install ramRender any time by running the installer mzp package.

Q&A

q: what version of 3DsMax does ramRender work with?

a: The earliest version that will work is 3DsMax9, this is because ramRender relies on Maxscript code that was introduced with v9. I have tested it successfully on Max 2009, 2010, and 2011

q: how come there is another ram Player every time I render?

a: Autodesk have not made many controls of the Ram Player available to Maxscript, and this is as much as I could do

q: I would like a feature added or change, is that possible?

a: Yes, if you have some suggestions about how to improve ramRender then I’m all ears. Please comment below

q: What renderers is ramRender compatible with?

a: ramRender is compatible with any renderer that uses the 3DsMax render frame window. This means that it is compatible with VRay, but not the VRay frame buffer. Users of the VRay frame buffer will be able to use the built in VRay Frame buffer History tool that comes with VRay.