This animation project was created as an introductory slide to a powerpoint presentation for a client,  giving a general overview of the massing of the project withing it’s immediate context.

The process of creating it was as follows:

1. Open Sketchup and Google Earth (Pro is better for exporting high resolution stills)
2. Locate the project site in Google Earth
3. Go back to Sketchup and click ‘Get Current View’ from the ‘Tools’ menu
4. Create model with the context added from Google Earth
5. GO back to Google Earth save the current view as an image (as high resolution as possible)
6. Import this as an image in Sketchup, scale to the same size as the black and white image
   
7. Explode the group to make it a texture and paint-bucket this new texture onto the old black and white context (you will need to right-click and unlock it first)
   
8. Create a circular path in animate, looking at the center of the model and render all scenes.  ( I discussed how to do this in a previous post here)
9. Now wait! This was 600 scenes, which equates to a 20 second animation @ 30 fps.
10. Combine the images into a mov file in Quicktime Pro using ‘Open as Image Sequence’.

There are many tutorials on how to do the above, I heartly recommend the Sketchup School ones that are found on Youtube.

The Advanced Learning Schools Project had been one of my major projects of 2009, and the Music and Arts building of the campus is featured on the back of this month’s The International Educator magazine.

More to come soon…

Pics of the glass arriving on site and being installed:

“Value becomes engulfed in miniature, and miniature causes one to dream…” Poetics of Space

Recently I’ve been playing around with how to make interactive panoramas with recent renderings. The above movie is only an autopilot version, but the interactive version can be seen here.

I read the following article on how to make Quicktime Panoramas on a forum for Podium. Thanks to Sbx for the info!

A few photos to mark this momentous occasion:  

An Irish worker on site the day after St Patrick’s Day!

The view from the private deck of a one-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor.

A mock-up of the window wall… 

Edit: If you have troubles viewing the file, click HERE to view in a new window.

This little number was my first test of how a sketchup model comes out when animated using the plugin Animate 2.0 alongside the ‘render all scenes’ option of another of Sketchup’s plugins, Podium. Quick and dirty (especially the blue cars???) but hopefully full of promise…

The process involved:

1. Create a Sketchup model, this was done by importing Cad files.

2. Create an Animation path with a 3D Polyline in Cad and import into SU

3. Download SU Animate and Podium if you don’t already have them.

4. Create a group of the object to be animated and call that group “Target”

5. Divide the Path into as many segments as you want frames (This was 600 which eqautes to roughly 30 frames per second)

6. Save file and then ‘Make Scenes’ from the Animate drop down menu.

7. Set a low resolution (640 x 480) and render all scenes in Podium

8. Finally compile all jpegs into a movie file… I did this in Quick Time Pro using the ‘Open Image Sequence’ tool.

9. Now wait! This animation was 600 images and took approximately 3 hours to ‘Render All Scenes’…

I’m trying to decide whether  better images are created by having a  ”working knowledge” of mulitple programs or by being good at just one?

Ah…Sketchup. So simple and annoying at the same time.

“Working Knowledge” of 3ds Max???

Master of Photoshop?

Gestalt Imagery? Maybe just not a master of 3ds Max!

A retroactive post from a visit to the site of 40 Berry towards the end of September. In preparations of pouring the second floor slab and after learning that the ground floor was poured incorrectly we went on site to see how things were coming along. Pretty interesting stuff… the view of manhattan skyline from the second floor (of a total of 7) was alone worth an afternoon out of the office!

Since this trip, the part-funders Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and the project got put on hold after pouring the slab. At this date though, the project is back on and work is due to start back up after Thanksgiving… could be one of the last in Williamsburg for a while!

Second floor slab forwork from plaza deck slab.

Formwork for the hopefully correct slab edge!

The monster beams of the parking level…

“Let me see you do this in a drawing”… a memorable quote from the visit.