INTO THE VOID

Post 5 for the Pumpkin Competition.  Need to start carving.

To hollow out the middle we could use a revolve.  Conceptual massing doesn't have a separate revolve tool, just draw an axis line and a closed loop like you would with the normal revolve tool, and "make void form".

So how about the eyes ?  Make a triangular profile that is resizeable in a separate mass family.  Load into project. Draw lines radiating out from the centre of the pumpkin, add angle parameters. Host a point on those lines, make reference plane visible, place triangle on plane.  Selec line & triangle, make void, Revit knows it's a sweep.

Let's pause here.  Is anyone else getting worried ?  It's all getting too messy.  How am I going to link all this together so it resizes as a unit ?  What does it equate to in the real world ?  Let's back up a bit and try something a bit simpler. 

Imagine we want a hollow Doric column (precast or GRP maybe)  All we need is another set of profiles, scaled down by a factor and used to define a void. Probably we want a smooth circular void. We already have a circle profile in this family, so it's easy to create another 3 types and link their radii to the outer profiles.  This is nice, because we only have one more parameter for the end user to worry about.  I called this "Void factor" and set it to 0.8    Inner Radius = Outer Radius x Void Factor

The result is still quite robust and versatile.   I spent a little time on the dialogue box organisation & parameter naming. I've made an effort to arrange things logically and think about ease-of-use, but probably it could be distilled down further.

Need to be careful with the convex "pumpkin" versions because the shell can get too thin and the family breaks.  Maybe we could find a way of linking the bulge factor & void factor together to avoid this.  Clearly the re-entrant forms are going to be difficult, but there is potential here.

There's been a dynamic going between organic & geometric, make-it-look-like-a-pumpkin v do something useful & interesting, one off originality v the common good.  And if I really wanted to make a pumpkin that is convincingly real, re-sizeable, with optional carved voids, I'm probably more than half-way there. 

But the offshoots and by-products are too rich to ignore.  So I let myself get carried away for a while. . There is a treasure-trove of semi-automated form finding on my doorstep now,  with copious references to flowers, jellyfish, starfish, lemon-squeezers ...    I'm also well on the way to a whole battery of classical column families.

Perhaps this whole exercise with its flip-flopping between pumpkins & columns is an apt metaphor for architecting in general.  Oscillating back and forth between what we would like & what we can afford. 

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.

GOING ORGANIC

Post number 3 of my pumpkin carving competition entry.

OK so the first image is a nice diagram that Wil sent me. It explains the derivation of the formulae in his original family. Now I understand better what he was driving at.  Probably more scientific than my "Bulge Factor" approach, but I'm going to persevere for the moment with my nested profiles.  In fact I'm going for a "Five Stack" this time around.

You may notice that the profile family looks neater now.  I've got the whole "select-filter-copyrotate" routine down now. But that's probably a separate post.

Using 5 profiles is a bit more hard work, but it gives me more options for sculpting the shape.  This time I want to focus on a more realistic, organic looking pumpkin.  So this represents the opposite pole to that whole Doric, pure-geometry approach to Design.

Now I'm getting a rounded volume with a depressed centre. But it's still too regular.

I can play with the render settings.  Give it a bump map.  This one is based on the Leather Fabrics, but with the depth of the bump map cranked up.

Looking at images of pumpkins I got the feeling that my segments were too regular. So I made another profile, being deliberately sloppy with the setting out.  This is better, but I need to give one or two segments an extra bulge.  I also reached into my bottom drawer for a render texture image that I made a while back to simulate old walling  (we do resorts that capture the feel of a desert village, see this link :  Bab al Shams by GAJ  )  It has a large-scale blotchiness.

Rendered up, the result is starting to get there. The stack of 5 profiles also gives more control over the stem.  I can keep most of it thin then just bulge out quickly at the base.  No way to achieve that with only 3 profiles. Would be better if it curved to one side, but that needs a different family with profiles swept along a path.  While I am busy messing with the render settings I sneaked in a background image from the bit in Cinderella where the fairy godmother transforms the pumpkin into a carriage.

I haven't used the background image in renders much before.  I like the way the automatic sky responds to different times of day.  Flat images of the sky tend to look a bit ... flat.  But perhaps there is scope for using images in a more diagramatic context.  It's OK to be flat when you are not trying for that ultra-photo-real effect.

In the end, everything we do is a diagram, and sometimes a simple thumbnail sketch is the best way of communicating an idea. We should spend more time thinking about what is the BIM equivalent to this.

  The massing tools are one approach, but there must be many others.  Just because it's an intelligent 3d model it doesn't have to be so complex that you can't see the wood for the trees.  For example, a while ago I made a Revit version of one of Corb's simple diagrams.  "Less is more" as a cigar-smoking German once said.