...a hobby-project (that's more truthful but less grand-sounding than calling it "theoretical" architecture) I undertook for a number of reasons. I've submitted it to a competition, and plan to send it off to another in the fall. The design will be refined (or potentially put through a mangle), of course, over that time. And I plan on trying out a variety of different approaches to rendering...none of them being photorealistic. Photorealism (or perhaps reality) is not something that interests me on my own time.

Higher resolution images at Picasa here.

The current model is entirely SU without any Rubies other than that tube-along-path one...although previous iterations of the "project" have been hand-drawn, modeled/rendered in Blender, and most recently modeled/animated in Rhino.

In order to make the last deadline, these particular images are of course SketchUp 2D output layered in Photoshop CS3 XT with a bit of GIMP for certain areas...I have a new copy of Piranesi which I'm planning on using for the interiors, but for some reason the Piranesi interface isn't "clicking" with me and to beat the clock I resorted to my old standbys.

General site in GE (the project is actually "sited" in a version of this location described in an 1829 survey...so much for reality):

EDIT: The attached KMZ file now contains the 1829 map as an overlay...to get this to work properly, download the ZIP and rename the file type to ".kmz", then open it from Google Earth. Why, incidentally, can't we upload KMZ files without renaming them? They are only a customized type of ZIP to begin with.

Deception-I-BH-v4-200m.zip

Alan, this is a link to part of the SketchUp beta forum. No, you can't get to the active part where bugs are reported from this relic.

Professional response? For you, "toxic", after pronouncing our conversation "techno-dropping nonsense"? Now you claim "professionalism" after interjecting yourself in the thread in such a way? Find your own forum, toxic, one better suited to your alias.

@toxicvoxel said:

I marvel at how this topic has turned into a name- / techno-dropping nonsense.
Let's see some results of using the tools rather than just talking about it (or any other random unrelated ramble.)

You fail to impress or intimidate me, abrasive little man. Go somewhere else if it bothers you. Actually, go find another forum. Your contributions here are insignificant.

I looked it up...Friday night distractions. Unfortunately, I'm more likely to be the "evil Kirk" from The Enemy Within, not the "evil Spock" from In a Mirror, Darkly.

I'm sorry, even when "evil" William Shatner is just not that cool. I better hope this place is named after my grandfather.

@unknownuser said:

I think you should test that....call them up. There can't be many of you...they should allow the honorarium.

Actually, there are (still) more than one of "me", given that every male in my line has been named Lewissince 1861. That's the logical solution: my grandfather was a major employer there for forty years or so.

Still, it would be nice (or just bizarre) to imagine a "bad Star Trek" explanation: sometime around 1986, there was a malfunction in the transporter which split me into two separate entities. The "light" Lewis stayed in Florida became a pillar of the community, and was honored for it. Whereas the "dark" Lewis moved North and became the dissipated, infamous cynic and wannabe-starchitect. And neither one was aware of the other's existence, until one day....

I love it! I'm like the evil Spock!

It's an elementary school in my old home town, where I haven't lived for 22 years.

This is a little weird. I need to check on this with my parents.

@unknownuser said:

Yes....that is uncanny....buy it up. Although you strike me as a modest person when it applies to dress.

Since I amLewis Wadsworth, does that make me a Lewis Wadsworth Alumnus by default?

@unknownuser said:

Come on Lewis, You just made that up!

Nope, I was looking for an article I wrote a couple of years ago, which was no longer at the link I had bookmarked. And found this.

I may have to order the laundry bag. Or a T-Shirt. Or..oh, hell...one of everything, right?

Panthers?

You find the strangest things on the web.

@remus said:

How good are the meshes form the points?

Pretty damn messy, the one time I used this. Anything out of "line of sight" of the laser emitter was ignored, so you had to rebuild the missing faces using the faces it did sample. I assume that more sophisticated versions of this (or more sophisticated users) would allow you to move the unit around, fixing its position with GPS, and assemble a more complete scan.

And it was slow, too. Another student at my grad school scanned someone dancing, and then milled out a (very abstract) flowing relief sculpture...the mesh was composed of multiple periods in the dance, frozen into one giant mesh about eight feet long.

@remus said:

Could i ask what they are usually used for?

It's a digital rangefinder. The distances it collects can be assembled to produce a 3D model. This is the sort to which I had very brief access. Essentially, you pointed it in a certain direction and it returned a point-cloud that could be converted into a mesh.

Here's animated diagram of how it works:

This is all from Wikimedia Commons.

I've used a lidar...this is a pretty fascinating repurposing of one.

@pixero said:

Here is a quote I found at CgTalk:

@unknownuser said:

We are studying how to support user generated content. We would like to support two kinds of users: (1) artists and designers that are already competent with Max, Maya, SketchUp and other professional DCC tools and (2) average users who would like to model, paint and animate their own stuff. Its fairly short hop to #1 but there's a lot policy work and polishing to make it ready for public consumption.

Mark Young
Google UX Design

What the hell does that mean? I feel like I'm channeling Napoleon Dynamite: "Whaddya think, are they freakin' idiots?"

Oh, hey, it's KB who pushed Open Sourcing this. I asked about this a long time ago in the other forum, and they said, "Uh, no. We have patents in SketchUp and we want to hold on to them."

Open Source projects are nicebecause they are free, badbecause Open Source is a religious concept to many people and they are irrational about it...and finally really bad because FOSS projects rarely ever see concerted development and innovative feature addition (Mozilla apps and Ubuntu being likely exceptions). And Open Source projects tend to be run by strong-willed individuals who have their own vision for the apps and don't necessarily care about non-coding users. (And why should they? You're not paying them to do this!)

Come to think of it, that situation sounds very familiar.

I have heard of k-3d, and keep it on my machines. It'll will be great and fully functional for professional design purposes, at this rate, in about 13.5 years, by which time of course we will be absorbed by the Singularity (so who'll give a damn about 3D modeling then, anyway?).

By Linux purists, do you mean Stallman-type Open-Source advocates? The kind of people who insist upon using the awful version of Ubuntu (or worse, Debian) without any proprietary software at all? That's a religious stance they hold, and it's about as useful. And I have as about as much use for those who hold it as I do for any fundamentalists.

I actually don't care as much about Linux as I do about the interfaces of the various desktop managers, which are of course available on a variety of "engines" that matter very little to non-coders as long as they keep the interfaces running and apps cooking along. I've read of people getting SketchUp to run on BSD and OpenSolaris...more power to them.

Has anyone had more luck with SU-on-Wine-on-Linux on any particular desktop manager than with others? I have personally only tried it on plain-Jane GNOME, and it seems to be fine.

@-rb- said:

so who knows, I may become an Eiseman yet.

Careful about saying things like that...one day in a seminar I had with the man in grad school he referred to himself as "the Voice of Darkness." I laughed, thinking he was joking, and said something like, "Well, good, I've always been a satanist at heart." He turned to me and said, without blinking, "Wadsworth, if you ever compare yourself to me again I will make personally sure you never have a job in architecture on the planet again."

How's that for an off-topic?

@-rb- said:

I downloaded the Rhino SR3 pack last night and am running Grasshopper now. Very exciting to experiment using VAD - it just seems so logically set out too. Genuis.

Sorry to veer off topic slightly with generative design but it has been floating my boat as of late.

I'm looking forward to using it, as well...I think the challenge would be to use it for something other than generative design (which often seems just like an excuse for extravagant formalism to me, a kind of technologically-deterministic version of Eisenman's process-based design, and just as empty of meaning ultimately--Peter was one of my teachers and I'm sensitive about the flaws in his methods).

It would be nice to find a Visual Programming Language (VL or VAD...I think VL is a more common abbreviation) that could function as like a true computer language and not just a scripting language...so that you could actually compile it, the way you can with C, or at the very least run it on a virtual machine like Java.

I'm also thinking about buying a copy of Max/MSP/Jitter...imaging is something that interests me almost as much as architecture, and Jitter is better documented than PD or VVVV.

By the way, I was led to understand (Pete/Solo would know more about this) that the next version of Podium for SketchUp would include a noded VL shader designer.

@nankyo said:

check out the Rhino Labs things : http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.aspx/McNeel/RhinoHomeLabs.html
there is plug ins to im/wx directly

Did you read the earlier posts at all?

@unknownuser said:

Lewis . . .what kind of regime were you working under? that is unbelievable. you would think .. you would HOPE that design people would be the most open-minded and innovative thinkers and would realize the no matter what tools one uses. .. .SU, Max, Pencil and Paper of CHisel and Stone. . .DEsign is design is design.> What difference could it make. What a gang of thugs those guys must be.

I don't want to end up completely unemployed, so I will have to write you a PM about which school fired me, David. Being fired from a studio is a "blacklisting" capital crime, you know, even if it is for silly reasons. I'll never get another job as a studio critic again, anywhere. All because I supported SU as a design tool!

But I can tell you that at the GSD (Harvard's school--where I do not teach, for a number of reasons...I doubt they would have me as a Yalie even if I didn't use SU), SketchUp is software non grata. I had this job with a minor starchitect high in hierarchy there...nothing he was doing required NURBS modeling or even BIM, and certainly the students he hired from his studio had zero competence at either. But to model his big project and produce his publication renderings (and not be harassed about how I was doing it) I had to alter SU's screen colors to resemble Rhino's. Since no one there really knew what Rhino was other than it was suitable for architecture (as SU wasn't), I could get the job done in crash time.

I could actually have just done it in Rhino, but it would have taken four months and not three, of course. Worse interface--although McNeel, unlike Google, has actively updated and improved their software since then.

Most of the stranger-architects writing me about my crime in teaching SketchUp seem to be German, for some reason. Like I said, who has the time for that?

And seeing SU devolve into a content creation tool for things like Lively is going to change their minds?

@dale said:

@lewiswadsworth said:

Most of the stranger-architects writing me about my crime in teaching SketchUp seem to be German, for some reason. Like I said, who has the time for that?
?

Were any of them suggesting what design software you should be using Lewis?

Rhino, mainly. Ironically enough, I also teach a course in Rhino...I've been using it 7 years, and SU only 6. Rhino's interface is clunkier for designpurposes, though considerably more precise and capable as amaker of models. But for some reason the distinction is lost on most architects I try to explain that to. I'm becoming tired of trying to explain it.

I should try to find that email where I tried to explain this to a former schoolmate of mine in Gehry's office! I think she has decided I'm an idiot now, beneath the notice of such exalted professionals.

Hmmm...I've noticed more Google team watching this thread.