Wednesday, October 26, 2011

MUSHROOMS & MICE

Post 4 of our Pumpkin Competition.


This one is just a series of random doodles.  What else can I do with profiles ?  How do I make a more realistic stem ?  Hey that looks like a mushroom ! 


Place 5 points on a vertical plane. Make a spline-by-points Set their work planes to always show. Host the 5 profiles on these planes.  (took a bit of coaxing)  Play with different radii and move the points about manually (push-pull)  Make the top two points adaptive (shape handle


Now I can take it into the project and fiddle with how the top of the stem curls over.  All a bit sluggish (delayed response), but quite interesting.  I've reverted to using 2011 so that the downloads will be more accessible.  This means the adaptive component has to be placed in an in-place mass family, not directly in the project.  No big deal.


Oops, now Florence is back, and the cat too.  Looks like a stage set with a painted backdrop, it's a problem we often face with RPC content: wonderful clever stuff, but watch out for the 2 dimensional give-aways.  Still, it gives me a chance to show off a bit in photoshop.  who wants a totally photo-real world anyway ?  And there's carving too, not parametric yet, but real pumpkin-face carving.  I love the way that Alice & Florence both seem to be staring at the Cheshire cat.  Maybe there are mice hiding in the pumpkin.  Something's making kitty's eyes light up.  It's also quite neat how the water-colour effect makes the two RPC trees blend with the background image.


OK, so I've added the mice, and it's all getting a bit silly.  But the point is that sometimes these "random accidents" can point to serious possibilities.  We are always playing in the space between image and reality, 3 dimensional experience & 2 dimensional diagram.  It's largely a question of how you navigate back & forth between these different worlds.  And suddenly I'm reminded of the most prosaic example.  Bannister Fletcher's page on the Doric Order.


Once again it's the juxtaposition of different scales and modes of drawing in order to compress a complex information set into a single image.  For sure BIM is changing our world, and we have to open our minds to new possibilities, possibly the demise of the "construction drawing" as we know it, but let's also remain alert to unexpected parallels and lessons from the past.

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