SHOPHOUSE DETAILS

 I made a bit of a meal of this for various reasons but got there in the end... And the festoon motif is scalable via the double-nested Planting hack.

That makes for more levels of nesting than we might normally prefer. Generic Models for the base level components. Then two levels of Planting family and finally a wall-hosted GM with the frame moulding. Surprisingly it doesn't seem to affect performance. 😳

Now I have it set up, should be easy enough to insert different designs at the base level. Maybe I will try a couple more tomorrow.

 

I am not a plasterer, though I dabbled a bit in my youth. Whatever your chosen medium, as an artist you strive to understand its potential, "what it wants to be"

So there is the nature of the object or activity that you wish to represent, and the nature of the medium. How can you blend these two in some kind of synergy? How can you bring out the beauty, the energy, the inner tension of both?

As promised I have created a second wall panel, inspired by an example seen in Singapore last month. It was much easier second time around. I have focused on the silhouette and ignored the subtlety of texture and as-relief modelling.

This is Revit. The approach is to capture the location, size, material and quantity of each component within a building. Further information will be given in the specification and details via a code embedded in the object and tagged on relevant sheets.

Elements should be recognisable but not over-detailed. The main model is not the place to explain how to make each sub-component. We just want to capture something of their essence and understand how they fit together.

It's not a commercial project. This is my personal research into "the Way We Build" in different times and places. That's my lifelong passion, and my BIM pencil has become the mainstay of my explorations.

 

The long weekend has been great. Had a very special meal at my local Syrian restaurant. Also made good progress on two of my BIM pencil explorations.

I posted a final image (for now) for the Elizabethan ceiling diversion. Today I want to tie up the shophouses for another week.

 

Cue Enscape3d my indispensable real-time rendering buddy. I had to spend a couple of hours this morning on materials. This is my best yet attempt at getting a flat surface to render as if it was a set of horizontal louvres.

Another thing this image collage reveals is that the internal layouts are lagging behind as I spent the last couple of weeks on facade elements. Floor plan is rather sparse.

Step by step.

 

 

It's not a true render, but Realistic mode in Revit gives a very useful intimation of how texture maps and bump maps are going to perform.

In this case I use the same image for both and set a different tint to correlate with the colour used in the framing. So very easy to generate the three materials I needed for the current shophouse model.

For many years I have been using a material with a parallel lines hatch to represent louvres on doors and ventilation panels. It's a simple lightweight solution compared to modelling each louvre blade in 3d.

The weakest link in this approach has been rendered views. So this is a useful step forward. First square = my previous bump map. I just added a dark grey bar to emphasise the depth drop, then gave the whole thing a fuzzy granular texture.

It's still very mechanical of course, but I'll take it.