Posts made by lewiswadsworth

Thanks, Eeva. They really do look great.

97-98-99%--Got it...bye, everyone. Unless this thing is bogus...

Congratulations. These are very nice. Would it be possible to see more details of the second poster, with the rendered images, if you're friend doesn't mind? I would like to have a better understanding of the lighting in your project.

@c.s.cameron said:

SketchUp now seems to be running 100% with wine in Umbuntu Linux.
Windows is looking like a thing of the past.
Is there any discussion on this subject in the forums?
Search did not give any results

Hi Cork. I remember you from the old SketchUp forum.

Yes, big thread here:

http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=9687

I just changed the title from Rubies and SketchUp on Linux to SketchUp and Rubies on Linux...perhaps that will help with future searches.

One of my tasks for tomorrow is tracking down some issues with the 64-bit version of Ubuntu and SketchUp.

By the way, if you have different registry settings or suggestions for SU-on-Linux, please do add them to that thread. Google (I've been led to believe) now directs people wanting help there, since they will not themselves support SU on the platform.

@unknownuser said:

Try not to focus on the obstacles but on the opportunities.

Chances that it is a real project is next to zero, so if you're going to enter do so with some zest for the competition and the site.

Oh, it's not a real project. It's just a really absurdly-sited fake one. Unfortunately, not absurd or unlikely enough to feel like an interesting fantasy (i.e., "house on Mars", "habitats in L4", "the floating skyscrapers", "DMZ re-imagined"...those sorts of things).

I may enter something...or not. I'm toying with the idea of submitting a post-apocalyptic house, after "the Big One" levels the rest of the city. Or perhaps this would be a time to make a point about the homeless population...and "design" a shanty-town like those so popular with socially-conscious students on rich Ivy League campus greens in the late 1980's.

But there are other concurrent competitions, including the Line of Site Brief 3 sponsored by Google (UK), that seem to be put together with a bit more thought and wouldn't require so much a cynical response. Even the Sportablescompetition that Google started at the 3DBC under the saintly aegis of Cameron Sinclair was better designed.

I'm just disappointed with Google. I assume that this was an attempt to demonstrate that SU could be used for ordinary, unsaintly but innovative residential architecture (yes, I know we know that, but the academic elite with which I unfortunately deal consider it a toy beneath the profession). A poorly-designed competition will result exactly in that sort of entry...and not do anything to legitimize the program in the eyes of the sort of people who have already heard that it can't be used for "serious" architectural work.

arvmehta,

Aksels' procedure is generally unnecessary now. I could never make it work anyway.

Look at that longer thread linked above, remove all the old versions of WINE and any dependencies, and then reinstall everything...new version of WINE, newest version of SU, newest updates to Ubuntu--and try those registry settings (although yesterday when I installed SU on Wine on an Ubuntu 64-bit system they didn't even seem necessary). Make sure you use the version of WINE from WineHQ for your distro, too:

http://www.winehq.org/site/download
http://www.winehq.org/site/download-deb

Add their WINE repository, if you use .deb, to your system's set of trusted APT keys, as directed.

Don't rely on the version in the Ubuntu repositories...it tends to lag significantly behind the current releases.

Also, as noted in the other thread, none of this seems to work unless you have a modern NVidia card with the non-Open-Source driver activated...I have been told by some other users that it doesn't work at all under ATI cards or with integrated graphics (Intel).

Be aware that performance is still a little worse than under Windows...there doesn't seem to be any way to get around that.

Just out of curiosity, I googled (ha!) Crissy Field. In fact, it's part of a United States national park, not just a local park.

At a period in U.S. history when there is even-greater-than-usual pressure to develop and exploit public lands and parks, we're supposed to design a house in the middle of a really popular one that caters to children? I'm not sure I'm capable of even a cynical entry.

So, what's the next Google-sponsored competition after this? A crude-oil pumping-and-transshipment station in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?

Intimidating. I'm reminded of a certain Aphex Twin video's general setting and color scheme.

How about taking it all the way and putting some threatening clouds behind the buildings? or even changing the point of view slightly and having the tops of the buildings "hazed" a bit, as if they were just poking into the bottom layer of clouds? (This is an effect I observe often from my window, looking towards the high-rise buildings downtown.)

You know it's also a fill-site? This is one of those areas, if I recall my San Francisco history correctly, where the terrain liquefies during a major seismic event.

I have the impression that whoever chose this particular site is neither an architect nor someone who works with architects very often. They're also probably not from San Francisco.

@michelinux said:

If you have a 64bit CPU (Intel or AMD, ubuntu 64 is for both) you can experience clear performance improvement from system boot speed to every application, particularly with applications that require a lot of RAM. Moreover it has been resolved the problem with non-64bit applications like adobe flash player and openoffice.

The space, but the time in order to test a system does not lack me, but I can test it to my friend's pc.

ciao
Mick

Mick, I did test SU Pro on Ubuntu 8.04 AMD64 (on a computer where I also have it running on both XP and Ubuntu 32bit), and I was able to get the same range of image sizes for both PNG and JPEG exports as I can on Windows...an easy 4000 pixel max dimension. And (possibly because of an update recently to WINE) SU no longer required the Registry changes noted above to work immediately after install...it opened with some empty TOD, Instructor, and Learning Center windows, but these no longer aborted the program start.

However, it does seem like SU might be a little more likely to hang on Ubuntu 64. Launching Firefox at the same time as SU was open caused the SU window contents to disappear and the app to freeze at one point, although I haven't been able to duplicate that problem and it has been working since.

Incidentally, the newest update to WINE (they claim) should allow one to run a wider range of Windows graphical applications, most notably Photoshop CS3. That's pretty amazing...I'll have to test it.

--Lewis

Thanks...that is very interesting. I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu 64 and I'll install it on a Core Duo computer sometime in a day or so and try this myself. Let us know about whether your SU 2D export problem persists on your friend's computer.

I've been working on a fairly large SU project recently (the one pictured above), and I have noticed that with increasing model complexity the general performance (modeling, screen redrawing, etc.) does seem to get worse faster on SU on Wine on Ubuntu 8.04LTS 32bit than it does on XP SP3 on the same hardware. But 2D and 3D exports seem to finish much, much faster on Ubuntu than they do on XP.

By the way, I'm told that if someone contacts Google SketchUp's support team with a question about SU on Linux now, they are directed to look at this thread!

Well, thanks guys. That cheers me up quite a bit. I was just going through the typical bleeding-edge architecture and 3D modeling sites last night and thinking to myself that I was completely out of step with everything...both trends in design (generative-script-driven stuff is everywhere) and in modeling/rendering (parametrics/BIM and ever-more-life-like variations on raytracing).

I hope to have some time to elaborate this project further and try some other rendering processes soon.

Durant,

Your work is the most graphically unique on this whole forum...in fact, every time you post an image I download it and save it to a folder marked "Durant" for future reference. I don't do that for anyone else's work on this site, incidentally.

These images you post are like Ambrose Bierce ghost stories...spare, perverse, and exactly to the point. Nothing any photorealistic renderer is going to offer you will improve upon their needle-like effectiveness.

I'd hate to see you jump on the photorealistic bandwagon. Anyone can make something cool with that stuff. You seemingly can achieve more effect with much more limited tools...and that might be part of the appeal of your work.

--Lewis

Thanks. I'll have to think about how to do the line business...maybe by applying a depth of field mask onto the shadow-only layer before I start the rigmarole of creating the photocopy effect. I could also start with wider profile lines, and hit their layer with a DOF if the Styles window isn't helpful enough (EDIT:Piranesi will do this with edges.) There are profile-only and lines-only output layers, but the latter rarely survives into the final render.

I was just looking at some of Schuiten's drawings, and his profile lines stay fairly consistent in width from near to far, but the contents (including edges, shading, and colors) tend to disappear with distance.

It's possible that this is a topic that should be more general than the Architecture SIUG.

http://www.dwell.com/services/contests/design_your_dwelling.html

I assume that most people who read the SketchUpdate saw this. With some spare time finally I actually went through the rules and downloaded the site KMZ today, and there are some interesting points.

Normally I'm all for open competitions with financially-negligible prizes...after all, designing interesting buildings that will never be built on odd sites is something I do largely as a hobby (because I'll never, I'm certain, do any such thing no matter how long I work in architecture...that's just the way it goes!), and I like the stimulus of someone else setting the rules for a change...it makes up, slightly, for the vast and stultifying void, empty of all creativity and imagination, that is a career in architecture. But I'm a little disappointed in this particular competition.

For instance, take the site, which is in the middle of big, empty and flat Crissy Field, a former airfield and current public park east of the Presidio in San Francisco. That's hardly typical of the narrow and topographically challenging lots (think major grade changes!) I've always found fascinating about so much of urban San Fransisco. Every time I visit the city I find myself mentally developing all kinds of schemes for the ideal townhouse on one of those impossibly steep streets.

Actually, Google-Dwell's appointed sit is hardly urban at all...why did they specify this spot, if they had to choose something untypical of San Francisco? Why not--say--choose Alcatraz, if they're in the mood for places you can't put residential architecture in the Bay area? Or the Sutro Baths site?--can't beat that one for drama! Why not be totally random if you want impossible sites? Why not Deception Island off the Antarctic coast? The chosen location in Crissy Field is possibly the most un-urban spot you could choose in one of the most built-up urban areas in the United States (which certainly contributes to its interest as a city).

The rules for this competition are also a bit odd. Since this is a promotional piece for both Google and DwellMagazine (which, if you haven't read it, you should think of it as softcore porn for Modern Architecture fetishists), you might expect that they would reserve the right to publish and advertise with your submission without having to pay you anything (at all). But apparently they also have the right to modify your design once you send it to them, to change every bit of it.

And, most interesting of all:

@unknownuser said:

Incomplete entries or entries not created using Google SketchUp will be not be considered for judging.

Does that mean that your model must be created solelyusing SketchUp?

So does that mean if you render your SU model in VRay or post-process it in Piranesi, it is instantly disqualified? What if you use some of the new Ruby tools to make a Gehry-esque statement? Does the fact that you've used one of Dale's non-Google-published scripts to make something organic blow you out of the water? What if you're one of those compulsive people who have to work in CAD and then you use SU to make 3D models? Are you disqualified?

I see some issues here.

That would be kind of challenging, Mike. It's worth a shot...I'll add it to the ever-increasing list of things I want to experiment with.

Photoshop Extended can do movies after a fashion, but Piranesi can't...

I'm familiar obviously with the project and the rules for submission, and I'm finding this hard to "read" at the size I can get it on my screen. It's difficult for me to interpret the various elements as anything conveying information about a building, as opposed to parts of a collage.

Did you actually send it in to Line of Site? Last time they did this, they literally printed the submissions out on a sheet of A4 (which is a little larger than our "letter" size in the US), and began sorting entries into the competition like that. Only those that make the first few cuts seemed to get reviewed on a monitor. (I know this because there were videos of the process available.)

@watkins said:

Dear Lewis,

Would you write a few words about the project's brief please. The title Stormhouse suggests a refuge of some kind. Is this the case? The only storm houses I can think of are in Bangladesh where the division between land and water is a variable dictated by tidal surges in the Bay of Bengal and the monsoon rains.

Regards,
Bob

I did write some craziness about this that went with the submitted images:

stormhouse-LWadsworth.pdf

A kind of visual notion for a waterfront structure like this came to me almost 8 years ago while I was walking in the "flood-danger zone" outside of Providence's Fox Point hurricane barriers, and eventually I figured out what my imagined structure was for...it's another elliptical little dark fantasy like this one. Believe it or not, there is a certain "market" (in an intellectual sense, if not a financial one, anyway) for such things in the profession, and every year there are a certain number of (generally disparaged) competitions for "unbuilt architecture" or "fantastic architecture."

I should add that most of the real projects with which I have been involved would not be worth the bandwidth for me to show them here...boring labs, dormitories, and federal facilities...nothing worth thinking about or remembering.

Here's a Picasa web album of a variety of older versions of this beast, including an embarrassingly naive hand-axon-drawing from a long time ago.

Thanks, Eric, Stinkie and Dale. I'm seeing a lot of flaws and bad choices in these things now, as usual once I've sent things off.

@unknownuser said:

Keep 'em coming, Lewis. I'd like to see you have a go at using a photoreal renderer. Curious about what you'd come up with.

...but photorealis one of things I do when people pay me...I have three different licenses to VRay, for instance. It's not my idea of fun, although of I admire those who can do it really well (like Solo, KB, and Silverlight, among other luminaries here).

The stylization of the images above reflect some of my recent interest in the approach to architectural depiction in certain dark and surreal graphic novels that were recommended to me by Frenchy Pilou on another forum.

Still, one of the other reasons I developed this model was to experiment with software that might be of use in illustrating architecture. I usually don't have the leisure for experimenting when working for someone. So there are other renderers and tools on my list. But Piranesi cost me a considerable sum, and I'm determined that is at the top of learning curve now.

Sorry for the dead img tags in the first post...thanks for bringing it to my attention, Bruce. Google apparently won't let you link to an image hosted in a Picasa webalbum...kind of a shame, as I could use Picasa to batch update, resize, and reload any changes. (It would work in preview, but not in the post!)