FRATTONISING WITH CONTEXT

 

Second attempt to bring in Site Context via Autodesk Forma, an online service that is part of the AEC collection.  I’ve been using this sporadically for a couple of years now and it’s a very promising workflow compared to anything I used before.  The West Woodhay church was a very rural church with rolling hills, so full 3d Topo was a mush. Here I am starting to regret using the same approach. A flat ground base might have worked better from a memory management point of view.

 

It's a low-lying urban site, about 10m above sea level in the middle of Portsea Island which is more of a peninsular, and almost completely absorbed by the urban fabric of Portsmouth now. The local area is Fratton, or Fratton Road. So I’m calling this church St Mary,Fratton and giving it the Code PP51E, The toposolids that come in from Forma have a transparent top layer which is subdivided into roads and plots etc based on open-source mapping data. The base layer uses a material that has a texture map that shows up in realistic views. Basically the aerial photo data you get in google earth or similar.

Sadly, the default material for this layer shows up as dark brown in a shaded view. I don’t know why Autodesk took this decision, it dates back to the default topo-surface material years ago, and I have never liked it.  It just makes everything so dismal and lacking in contrast/clarity. 

 

I thought I had bought a pretty serious laptop for the “retirement” phase of my digital life, but 64gb is struggling to deal with this linked Revit file. Eventually I was able to open it up and change the material to a medium olive green which I find lighter on the eyes.  The buildings and trees don’t have a material parameter; they are just Generic Model “stuff” which defaults to battleship grey. Once again pretty dismal. I have resorted. to Visibility Graphics, which is view specific and chosen a lighter grey. It’s a start.

The red lines are major roads, orange is a new road for the car-centric age. Brown is the railway line with circles representing a stations. It’s actually a chain line although it’s difficult to tell at this scale.  You can clearly see the relationship to the dockyards in the final image.

 

This was a heavy day. Working with the Forma export, context model for the Fratton church. It was extremely sluggish and I couldn’t quite fathom why. I just assumed it was to do with the urban location and I just had to tough it out until I got something usable.

I kind of got there by sleepy time, adding a floor for the churchyard, placing some trees and the church itself. You get a sense of streets and streets of terrace housing (urban Portsmouth) with the docks of the naval yard in the distance. Sadly my Internet connection would not load it into the cloud so I put it in a local folder.

Stupidly I chose a folder that syncs to Onedrive so it was constantly trying to sync in the background. Pain helps us learn.