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.

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.

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.

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.

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.