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.

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.

Here is the short aerial camera video that we (the meshroom) completed for the Foster and Partners Sofia masterplan competition this year. The job was completed in 3DStudio Max and VRay and initially rendered as still images at 8K pixels wide. We rendered them this large as they were going to be printed at an obscenely large scale. My colleague Dimitar was in Sofia when the exhibition was on and had a chance to see the final images printed out this size. The sunset image is shown at the end of the video.

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.

This is a short video showing the changes that take place during the post production of a rendering before it is finished. The renders that we create are of a very high standard, but we will usually enhance them using photoshop to get that extra touch. Many special effects such as volume lighting can be created in 3D at the cost of render time, but to add such an effect in photoshop or by using render effects and layers is very straight forward.

I’ve recently updated it to work with class instances, a much more efficient and almost foolproof way of ensuring we get all the maps.

It has two methods of functioning.

1. if the material editor is open, it will open all the maps used in the current material

2.if the editor is closed, then it will load all the maps used in the materials of the selected objects.

This is really handy script if you want to quickly adjust some materials maps in photoshop

for installation, just drop the mzp file onto you max viewport and then add the script to your quad (or menu, or toolbar!).

customize | customize user interface | category : JNScripts

Download the installation file here

Here is a run through of what’s happening under the hood.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--	Open bitmaps in photoshop
--	version 3.1
--	max version 2008, 2009, 2010
--	written by Joshua Newman
--	written		25/05/04
--	updated 	07/04/09
--	www.joshuanewman.net
--	copyright 2004, 2009
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-- if the material editor is open, the current materials bitmaps will be opened in photoshop.
-- otherwise all the bitmaps used in the current selection will be opened.

macroScript Photoshop category:"JN Scripts" tooltip:"Load bitmaps in Photoshop." icon:#("JNpshp",1)
(

	On isEnabled return (Try((Selection.count!=0 and selection[1].material!=undefined) or mateditor.isopen())Catch())
	On isVisible return (Try((Selection.count!=0 and selection[1].material!=undefined) or mateditor.isopen())Catch())
	On Execute Do
	(
		bitmaps=#()
		if mateditor.isopen() then
		(
			a=medit.getcurmtl()
			bitmaps=getClassInstances Bitmaptexture target:a
		) else
		(
			sel=selection as array
			for s in sel do
			(
				if s.material!=undefined then
				(
					newbitmaps=getclassinstances Bitmaptexture target:s.material
					for b in newbitmaps do if (finditem bitmaps b==0) then append bitmaps b
				)
			)
		)
		pshop=CreateOLEObject"Photoshop.Application"
		pshop.Visible=true
		for b in bitmaps do pshop.open b.filename
	)
)

Step by step.
macroscript definition.

macroScript Photoshop category:"JN Scripts" tooltip:"Load bitmaps in Photoshop." icon:#("JNpshp",1)
(

This defines the script as a macro, this allows you to add it as a keyboard shortcut, quad menu item, drop down menu item, or button on your tool bar.

	On isEnabled return (Try((Selection.count!=0 and selection[1].material!=undefined) or mateditor.isopen())Catch())
	On isVisible return (Try((Selection.count!=0 and selection[1].material!=undefined) or mateditor.isopen())Catch())

These two lines whether or not the tool is enabled or visible. For example, if it is in a quad menu, then at least one of these conditions must be met for the tool to be visible; 1. Either the material editor has to be open, 2. at least on object must be selected, 3. the first selected object must have a material.

	On Execute Do
	(

Where to start when the script is executed.

		bitmaps=#()

let’s define a variable to hold all the bitmaps we find

		if mateditor.isopen() then
		(

Is the material editor open?

			a=medit.getcurmtl()

if yes then lets get the currently selected material and place it in a temporary variable ‘a’

			newbitmaps=getClassInstances Bitmaptexture target:a

now use the getClassInstances function to get all dependents of the class Bitmaptexture and put them into our bitmaps variable. This will now contain an array.

		) else
		(

ok, so the material editor isn’t open then.

			sel=selection as array

Let’s convert the current selection into an array of objects.

			for s in sel do
			(

Now iterate through that selection object by object,

				if s.material!=undefined then
				(

and check to see if has a material assigned.

					newbitmaps=getclassinstances Bitmaptexture target:s.material

get all the bitmaps used in that material into a temporary variable, returns an array.

					for b in newbitmaps do if (finditem bitmaps b==0) then append bitmaps b

We then iterate through the array and check to see if the bitmap is already listed and add it if it isn’t. I’ve changed this line to remove the appendifunique function since this function was added to Max in version 2008. This will allow my script to work in earlier versions of max.

				)
			)
		)
		pshop=CreateOLEObject"Photoshop.Application"

This creates that OLE communication link with photoshop.

		pshop.Visible=true

This makes photoshop visible on the desktop, if it isn’t already.

		for b in bitmaps do if (doesfileexist b.filename) then pshop.open b.filename else (print b.filename)

Finally, we iterate through our array of bitmaps and check to see that the filenames are valid before opening them one by one in photoshop.

	)
)

Don’t forget to close your parenthesis!