@chrisglasier said:

@plot-paris said:

Nested Components
if you have a big model, with lots of components, you can easily loose your overview over all the objects in the component-editor.
therefore we now have nested components. for example, you create door-, and window-components. then you make the building a component as well - that automatically hides the door-, and window-components in the component editor.

Do you think my development of namesets could help in this respect?

I should point out that at this stage floor 5 has only a bathroom (other rooms have been named but not elaborated). Selecting elements displays just the walls, spaces just the products. What is displayed is determined by the way you organise the hierarchy.

What do you think?

Chris

What happens if you have an object that bridges typical categories, as in that project I screenshoted above? One exterior wall (a structural steel arch system) is also the roof. At other points the material rotates and becomes something that is almost a floor, or an underside of a floor surface.

This is the sort of situation where most BIM modelers lose value for me.

Fred, are you familiar with the work of architect Frederick John Kiesler? I think you would find his ideas interesting. There is an exhibit of some his work in NYC until the 24th:

http://www.drawingcenter.org/exh_current.cfm

I'm hoping to have a chance to see this myself, but time may not permit.

@kwistenbiebel said:

This does not make Sketchup more complicated...on the contrary.
What Plot-Paris presents is very logical.

It works just like the Windows explorer tree structure.
What's complicated about that? It provides a way to organise your file in a much better way.

But I do agree with your wish to have a 'straightforward' modeler.
I just think those things can be complementary...

One word: BRL-CAD

I'm really hoping they don't do anything like this...pretty soon SU will be as complex and unwieldy as a parametric modeler, or Blender. Capability should not be confused with usability.

I'd rather have a straightforward modeler which leaves the complexity to me.

I actually gave up on waiting for an exact match for my SLR lenses...I don't really take photos the same way anyhow. Right now, if I need to use an SLR I have an Olympus E420 that will take my prime Olympus OM lenses and exactly double their focal length, which is at least understandable. My Zuiko f3.5 50mm Macro 1:1 is, on the digital camera, a 100mm equivalent Macro 1:1, which is simply astonishing, and my f4 200mm Zuiko is now an f4 400mm equivalent lens.

I do miss not having a wider angle lens, though...my old 2.8 24mm is now a 48mm. I may have to eventually buy a wider digital Olympus lens.

Your setting in Rhino for 3DS export is set to "more polygons" than necessary.

When you save from Rhino, which is a NURBS modeler, to 3DS format, which is a polygonal mesh format that SU can open, as soon as you choose the name of the new exported file you'll get this little window named "Polygon Mesh Options." Move the slider left and you get fewer triangles, right you get more. Why would you want more? Only if you were exporting a surface with complex curvature would you need more polygons to approximate that smooth NURBS surface. If you don't have curving surfaces, go for fewer polygons. In 3DS format, by "polygons", we mean triangles, so any four-sided surface in Rhino will become at least two triangles. SU surfaces can be polygons with more than 3 sides, as long as they are planar, so you will have to remove the extra edge in SU.

By the way, Rhino 4 exports SU files with the correct plugin, free from McNeel.

http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.aspx/McNeel/ThreedWareHouse.html

Now, if your Solidswork file is already a high-polygon-count mesh in Rhino (which could happen if you imported it wrong), it will stay high-polygon-count when you export it as 3DS or as a SKP file. You'll need to fix it in Rhino using the _ReduceMesh command.

Curving surfaces from Rhino will always show multiple triangle faces in SU, unfortunately. The trick will be to use Rhino to get a mesh fairly close to what you want, and in Rhino clean it up with the eraser tool.

If you're ever stuck trying to import a really complex organic shape from Rhino to SU, there is a quick way to do it with the ExtractRenderMesh command in Rhino...you export the render mesh that the command creates to SU, so that what you get there is exactly what your video card was displaying in Rhino.

Look at my post above...I've edited it.

@edson said:

nick and lewis,

just for you information, in south america all you have to do to be an architect is to go through architectural school for five years. at the end they give you your diploma AND your professional license. there is no internship or exam. the positive evaluation of a bunch of guys (the final juries) who are at best crummy academics is taken as proof of professional competence by the institute of architects and the society as a whole.

from day one after graduation you are able to commit any crazyness you may think of. most architects in brasil have no clue as to what the profession entails. no wonder we have such bad cities, populated by horrible and almost useless buildings.

regards.

I have a client--an architect for whom I do production renderings--in Australia, and according to him this is also true there, Edson.

However, it would be hard to argue that the current arrangement for education and registration in the US has any result other than restricting potential competition for established practitioners. I'm being a cynic, of course--life-safety experience and professional standards and so forth, declare the regulating bodies--but I believe that the current arrangement evolved (not entirely consciously) as a way of deliberately heading off the kind of disruptive genius exemplified by Le Corbusier and Wright...and of course preventing those who know how to use newer technology or understand new materials from taking work away from those too lazy or mentally-ossified to learn new ways of doing things.

I also strongly suspect the system is also "designed" to prevent more women from entering the higher ranks of the profession here, as having children and taking maternity leave is very problematic with regard to completing one's drudgery-serfdom stint. I know three very intelligent architecture school graduates who abandoned their internships (and thus any hope of legally calling themselves "architects") after they became pregnant.

@unknownuser said:

we have another IV?!

My name means strong stranger. And I am an IV, too.

I went to grad school with a "IV" who actually went by the name "Fourth." I heard he just made principal at SOM.

Both Mies and Wright had formal apprenticeships in practicing architects' offices, a cognate to the current IDP "drudge-serf" method, except that formal apprenticeships had set terms generally and would come to an end, whereas the IDP is generally set up to make it ever more difficult for the intern to end his or her stint in serfdom. (Do you know that the same people who make up these rules, NCARB, collect a fee to keep track of your IDP status? That couldn't be a conflict of interest, could it?)

Apprenticeship began dying in the US around the turn of the last century, with the adoption of the Beaux Arts style of architectural education. For a while you could still get licensed if you showed that you had sufficient work experience under a registered architect, but fairly recently the last states that permitted that method dropped it.

Fred, that school where I teach has a distance learning program...take a look at the linked website above. However, learning about architecture, as rewarding as the topic might be, has little bearing, ultimately, on whether you can practice architecture in the US. The professional degree is just a requirement for officially starting your stint as a drudge-serf.

I think Google, as a whole, is more interested in Thin Client stuff, like Google Docs, where only the interface resides in your particular computer and everything else--files and apps--is in "the cloud."

Lewis Edward Wadsworth IV

Lewis: "Lion-Hearted" or "Famous in Battle" (Welsh Llewellynor Latin Ludovicusas origin)
Edward: "Guardian of Treasure" (Old English or Germanic origin)
Wadsworth: Place name in the West Riding of Yorkshire (I'm taking a guess that the word itself means "Rich in Herds", in some Germanic language). James Wadsworth, my immigrant ancestor, left that part of the world for New England in the early 17th century.
IV: Every male in my direct line has had the same name since 1861; we have numbers for distinction. An odd American tradition, more prevalent in the South.

@fbartels said:

This is totally outrageous and unacceptable. I say we rebel.

... so much for any fleeting thoughts of starting a second career in my mid-fifties.

Many of the modernist architects idolized perpetually in architecture schools and in architecture generally did not go through the kind of soul-crunching processes now legally required to practice architecture in the US.

For instance, Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris) was a watchmaker, whose formal "architectural" education was a local art school...he pretty much declared himself an architect and his "internship" consisted of a few months working for Peter Behrens. Then he stormed off to be brilliant and controversial for another sixty years. The name he chose for himself, meaning "the crow-like one", reflects his idea that he had re-invented himself.

No one gets to reinvent themselves any more, at least in architecture, without a lot of interesting strings getting pulled for them. For instance, how is Daniel Liebskind (of increasing fame and new World Trade Center notoriety) allowed to practice architecture in the US? He quite famously walked off the job as an intern for Meier.

Hi Nick.

Let me just begin by telling you that I let myself get talked out of architecture school when I was in mid-twenties, by this fellow named Tom Kundig. He was this young, clearly brilliant architect who lived next door to the house I bought in Seattle. In fact, he had renovated that house, prior to my purchase of it, for his former in-laws (when they weren't "former").

I was already considering architecture...I had an arts background (sculpture and drawing), and some computer skills (such as they were, in the early '90's), and I had renovated a house in Boston. So I asked my new neighbor for advice on the profession. He had us over for dinner in his pretty little house, and spent a considerable amount of time describing how negative and pointless so much of the profession was...how back-stabbing mean one's fellow practitioners could be, how out-of-touch academics (mean-spirited in their own way) were from the true grind of the profession, etc.

As I said, he talked me out of it. Tom moved to another part of the city in a few months, and I haven't spoken with him since then.

Almost a decade later, in 2000 (when I was 33) I decided to try again, went through the rigmarole, and got into Yale School of Architecture (more on that later). While I was there, I started noticing articles--and soon enough, whole books--about a certain Seattle architect:

http://books.google.com/books?id=nRbRm11U3wIC&dq=Tom+Kundig&pg=PP1&ots=BZf_nu5KeR&sig=Ib4vGn-KnKFXs1RyZIH00t6By8w&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result

I must have caught Tom at a bad point in his life. Hardly a month goes by now where I don't see his name in a publication or listed with an awards ceremony.

This is why I want to be careful about giving advice about architecture.

I have to do some work now...I'll write more a little later.

So then, does it really matter where you go to architecture school if you want an M.Arch?

Most architecture schools claim that their true business is teaching you, the student, how to Design-with-a-Capital-D. Design in fact plays a very small role in the real world of architecture, but in the academic (non-real) world it is everything. Many instructors (called "critics" in this arena) go into teaching just because of that...and perhaps they couldn't make it in the real world of getting architecture built, or they simply loathed all that sordid-but-necessary business of dealing with clients, contractors, costs, and so forth. And even though non-tenured faculty don't make much money, it is often a steadier income for an individual than real-world practice (talk to any residential architect right now about how steady work is, if you want understanding of that situation).

And architectural academia is also a route for getting ahead for some architects...the whole drudge-serf-associate-architect-principal continuum in the real non-academic world takes decades to cross for most people, and it wears you down. Therefore many capable (or depending on how you feel like looking at it, incapable) architects try for academic roles as critics: because then they get paid, and they get to talk about Design. And if they make a big enough name for themselves as a Talker or a Teacher, then someone outside academia might assume they know what they are talking about (even if they don't), and hire them to do a Real Project. Altruists aside (and I'm not sure I have met many altruists in architectural academia), teaching is often seen as a way to leap-frog the great tedious route from serfdom to Fountainhead.

So even if the critics in a program are in theory there to inculcate the abstruse principals of oh-so-noble Design in you, the student, many (but not all, we must hope) of them are just going through the motions and deep down inside they're waiting for that moment when they magically get a building.

Does it matter then which group of likely-frauds you put up with? Well, certain schools manage to populate their faculty with up-and-rising academics, who are successfully taking that shortcut off the path of drudgery, or even with "Starchitects" who have actually made it big time. So you can learn by example how to make it big through the academic route, even if you learn nothing about Design from them (more on the teaching of Design, later). And plus...those up-and-comers need their own drudges now since they are getting real projects and don't know anything about how to run them, so you can associate yourself with them. It is easier to get an internship with someone who knows you, like your critic, than it is with someone who doesn't. And since the academic architects need a lot of help--and can't, obviously, be at the drawing board all the time because of those tedious academic duties--their offices offer the drudge-serf quicker routes to more responsibility for the little Design that actually occurs than you will find in a firm not run by academics.

If you must take the drudge-serf route, then, it is marginally preferable to do it for a Starchitect or wanna-be-Starchitect (unless you need money...I know, personally, of several Starchitects who never, ever pay their serfs. "Payment" is working for them, learning Important Stuff at the Master's knees, you see. My old instructor Peter Eisenman--the most successful academic architect I have met--even brags about not paying his interns in his interviews.)

It's still rough...the most imaginative person I knew from my own class at YSOA went to work for her critic, Frank Gehry. Despite that, she abandoned her internship and has now left the profession for some role in software development. Drudgery is drudgery, despite the possibilities or pedigree associated with any particular drudge-serf position.

--

I'm sorry, Nick...this is coming across as very cynical, isn't it? I wonder if this is the sort of thing Tom Kundig felt when I asked him about architecture and schools, so long ago.

@johnsenior1973 said:

Lewis - You say that you must have caught Tom Kundig at a bad part in his life, but from your subsequent posts it looks pretty obvious that what he said was spot on.

Yes, it was. But I really wonder how he feels now that he is at the top. I did try to contact him a couple of years ago--I'm not sure why, perhaps to ask him for an internship position for myself--and he didn't return my call.

Oh, please, no more conversations about this.

OK, let's talk about architecture schools and the Master of Architecture professional degree (typically a 3-year-long program...and I'm referring to the US degree and US procedures for licensing, because I am only familiar with those).

Keep in mind from the beginning that an M.Arch. qualifies you for nothing, other than allowing you to begin the increasingly difficult process of assembling enough intern architect "experience" (experience as criminally-overworked and illegally-underpaid "drudge-serf," in other words) which itself only qualifies you (after an average of 7 years, currently, no matter what the propaganda says) for sitting for the Registration Exam. (An aside--a major rule change passed yesterday, now making it more difficult to accumulate drudge-time since your "experience" expires. Expect the drudge-serf phase of your career to lengthen considerably.)

You legally (in the US) cannot leave a school and go practice architecture without completing your drudgery-serfdom stint (called an "Intern Development Program") and then passing the Exam (unless of course, you bribe someone, although no one really talks about that--which doesn't mean it doesn't happen). Most architecture programs do not provide anything in the way of useful skills that would help you through your internship drudgery-serfdom, or even help you to acquire a position as a drudge-serf. For that matter, most accredited US architecture programs with which I am familiar also will not provide any particularly useful skills for actually being an architect, assuming you (unlike, apparently, better than half of all architecture school graduates) survive drudgery-serfdom and the exam and still want to have anything to do with the profession of architecture.

(Another aside: the program where I teach currently, the Boston Architectural College, does provide technical training, and it is something of an exception in this. Its program demands concurrent degree study and internship, so it takes longer but in theory you finish school at the same time as you complete your drudgery-serfdom stint. So there is a greater emphasis on helping you get an internship position, and unlike with most schools you do get a certain amount of technical training. This is held against the BAC and its graduates by more typically-programmed schools and their graduates, who call it the "trade school" method and are very prejudiced towards it.)

I used to call myself a professional photographer, but it's not the 35mm stuff I miss...it really is the instant films. Aside from my Minox microfilm camera, Polaroid SX-70 cameras were about the most elegant devices I ever owned for taking photos...now they are paperweights. I do have a Polaroid 680 SE SLR based on the SX-70's, and I've noticed that the local Staples is unloading some expiring 600 film...time for a great blow-out of instant photography perhaps?

Oh, wait, I have to work for a living, supposedly...

Anyway, thanks again for the styles, David.

Sadly enough, none of these Polaroid items will be be common, familiar image formats much longer...Polaroid has ceased manufacture of all instant films. There is a compatible Fuji-made pull-apart instant sheet in a few sizes, but the integral films like SX-70, 600, and Spectra are going, going, gone.