RETAIL REPAIRS

Oh dear.  First I forgot to share the file in google docs, then it turned out my furniture collection had 2 corrupt elements.  So I ran an audit this morning, resaved and zipped the file.  Loaded it up and shared it.  Creating a new link which I will ask Raina to check in a couple of minutes.

Furniture Collection 1a.zip

Humble apologies.  Hope it works now

COME SHOP WITH ME

Shops I have known

Firstly what used to be my Uncle Bill's chip shop in Barnsley, as it looks now.  Next a picture I took circa 1967 of a shop I used to pass every day on the way home from school.  Finally a shop in Kampala, snapped when I visited Uganda a couple of years back.

And this is my shop.  You may download the whole thing on condition that you donate 50 million zimdollars to your favourite charity.  Alternatively you can opt to smile at every one you meet for a whole day.  Click here to DOWNLOAD

Furniture 1a.zip

Next pic is Dubai Mall.  Sometimes drop by here on the way home.  Bit different from my walk home in Barnsley 44 years ago.  Now I drive down a six lane highway.  The mall has an ice rink and a 3 storey high aquarium with sharks, it's next to the tallest building in the world and has the biggest singing/dancing fountains on the planet too.  It's a fun place to chill out after a hard day at the office :)

But what is Fair Trade ?  How would you define it ?  Does it have anything to do with the vast disparities between Dubai Mall and the wooden shops of Kampala's informal suburbs.  What kind of world is it where I live in this space-station plonked down in the desert and go for a holiday in Africa's slums ? 

Received wisdom of the sustainability lobby in Europe and North America argues for buying locally grown food. Save the air miles ... hard to fault that logic.  But what about the women growing vegetables and cut flowers in Kenya just to keep their extended families alive.  Should we be sabotaging their market ?

No black and white answers to these questions, which is why my blog is "shades of grey".  So I'm sharing my families with you guys and I'm hoping we can all find ways of sharing with the wider world out there most of whom have no idea what Revit is and may be more concerned about access to a decent water supply.

My last pic is a bicycle which represents a young Ugandan's livelihood.  A constant stream of fit young fellows ride these bikes up a very steep hill to carry water from the river to a bustling little business centre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_trade

Fair trade is a trading partnership, based on dialogue, transparency and respect, that seeks greater equity in international trade.

STAMP COLLECTION

This is another post about my interactions with suppliers/manufacturers of building products.  Creative Concrete Concepts started out doing stamped concrete and have broadened out into a range of cement-based finishes.

 

 

They gave us a CPD recently and I asked my usual question (do you know about BIM & Revit) and got the usual answer (not really, but we're willing to learn)  So I've entered this dialogue where they send me jpegs and I demonstrate how these can be turned into Revit materials.

 

 

The plan is that this will generate the enthusiasm for them to take ownership of the project and make their entire range available in Revit format.  This opens up a discussion about how best to present materials as a downloadable package, complete with image/bump map pairs, suitably scaled fill patterns, specification codes etc.

 

 

But first of all, lets make a material. The source image should avoid these common mistakes:

• Image zoomed in to a small area, can't find the repeat
• Taken from an oblique angle, distorts when you correct the perspective
• Uneven brightness: dark on the left, pale on the right.

Step 1: crop the image to a rectangle that will repeat.

 

 

Step 2: offset the images so that the corners move to the middle
Step 3: make small adjustments to eliminate the cross-hairs effect
Step 4: save the image at an appropriate size

 

 

Step 5: change mode to grayscale
Step 6: enhance contrast
Step 7: save as bump map

 

 

Using this process you can create pairs of images for each material type.  These will be used in the render definition, which is one of 4 tabs in the material dialogue. 

 

 

The "Graphics" tab sets appearances used in construction drawings:  surface appearance and cross-section hatch.  The cut-pattern can be one of the standard drafting patterns supplied with Revit.  The surface appearance needs to be a model pattern.  This could be a "pat" file  downloaded from the web, or you could use a programme to generate your own hatch.

 

 

For our office I have compiled a "collection" file of fill patterns which is available on the server. This grows with each new project and encourages basic naming standards for filled regions & fill patterns. 
The last 2 tabs contain non-visual data (sometimes called the "I" in BIM)  This is information that can be picked up in tags & schedules.  Keynotes are potentially a very powerful feature because they provide the link to Specifications.  We us the British NBS system, which I still prefer to the US Masterformat, but that's another post.  Stamped concrete is going to come under section M10 and you will need to create some custom clauses here for the different patterns used on your project, perhaps M10/170A Proprietary Stamped Concrete Screed: type A, where type refers to the mould pattern and colour.

 

 

Revit will be able to calculate areas for type A, type B, type C ... and schedule this out with whatever information you type into the material properties.

 

 

Now won't it be nice when every brick manufacturer hands out Revit materials for their entire range with all this information already embedded. Not to mention tiles, rainscreen cladding, cultured stone, terrazzo, formica ...  So I'm making the effort to get this message across to every supplier I meet, and if you all do the same.  Surely it's achievable.