The AUP Project

January 14, 1997; Time Today: 3 hours, Total Time: 106 hours

Worked more on the interior walls, concentrating on the second floor north end. I’ve included the ventilation portals and 1/2″ reveals in the hallway walls. Creating the portals was easier than I thought. I changed the reference plane to ZX, and created a cylinder for the main portion of the portal using the ‘Circle by Center & Radius’ command, and then differencing the cylinder from the wall. The opening is beveled at 45 degrees, so I choose the ‘Circle by Center & Radius’ , and ’3D Converged Solid’ , which with the proper height, gave me a cone. I moved the cone into the correct position, and differenced it from the wall.

Second floor interior walls

Interior walls on the north end of the second floor

The AUP Project

January 6, 1997; Time Today: 2 hours, Total Time: 103 hours

Spent an hour adding some finish to the interior side of the exterior walls. I worked on parts of the first floor and the second floor.

First floor interior walls

Second floor interior walls

The AUP Project

June 30, 1996; Time Today: 4 hours, Total Time: 101 hours

I completed the brick exterior today. With the initial few panels created, it was easy to copy them around and add them together.

Brick Exterior

Brick Exterior

Brick Exterior

The AUP Project

May 27, 1996; Time Today: 3 hours, Total Time: 97 hours

Well, It’s been a while, but I did a little more work. I completed the brick exterior wall on the first floor, and worked on the brick of the top three floors on the north part of the building.

Completed brick on north end of building

Same as previous w/other structure

Test perspective of first floor plan

Perspective of entire building without roof

The AUP Project

March 29, 1996; Time Today: 16 hours, Total Time: 94 hours

Spent this week beginning work on the brick. I snapped a couple pictures of the brick on the building with our Apple Quicktake camera (waited until a sunny day to avoid the light variations you get with a flash). Took a sample that included one full brick with two half bricks above it. I used that as the image to tile in form*Z. It worked quite well. I’ve begun working on the first floor on the north end. The first floor brick is arranged in panels 6′ 8″ wide, and 2′ 1 3/4″ high. I created blocks of this size using the brick texture, and subtracted the window and door openings out of them. I’m learning more about how this texturing works. One thing I learned is that if you have an element created with one texture, and you difference and element using a different texture, the faces created by the differenced element will contain the texture of the differenced element. I’ll have to go back in and reassign some of these faces if they cause problems. This problem is most apparent where I have created window openings.

Brick on the first floor on the north end

Same as above with columns, floor, and CMU

The AUP Project

March 22, 1996; Time Today: 12 hours, Total Time: 78 hours

This week I worked on the exterior CMU for the building. Creating the blocks was easy. The more difficult area was in the texture mapping. Haven’t had to deal with that up to now in this project. I used our Apple QuickTake camera, and went down to the basement to get a photo of some unpainted CMU. I selected just a few blocks that I could tile to create the texture. I applied the texture, and it looked terrible. The photo has brighter in the center than the edges due to the flash, so the entire texture was wavey when it was tiled. I decided to create my own, so in photoshop, I created my blocks using color I sampled from the original photo for the blocks and the mortar. I then used the ‘noise’ filter to add apparent texture to the blocks. I then had to figure out how to get the block to be scaled properly on the blocks, which was easy. In the area where you edit a texture you can put in how big the image you’ve created should be, both vertically, and horizontally. Mine was 32″ long and 16″ tall. A bit harder than this was then getting the tiling to start in the right place on the block. Fortunately you have complete control over this on each object. The trade-off for this though it seems is that you almost have to check each object to make sure it is lined up properly. When it’s done right, it’s a cool effect, seeing your block texture line up with the openings you’ve created, just like in the real construction!

First Floor w/Exterior CMU

Same as Previous w/Ceiling

Just CMU for North End of Building

Just CMU for South End of Building

Just CMU for West End of Building

Just CMU for Entire Building

North End of Building w/CMU, Columns, Floors

Entire Building so Far

Photo of unpainted CMU

Image of CMU blocks using sampled colors

CMU texture with noise applied

The AUP Project

March 12, 1996; Time Today: 15 hours, Total Time: 66 hours

I’m Back! We got our renewed copy of form*Z a few weeks ago. Haven’t had much time to work on the project at school, so I’ve moved a PowerPC machine to my home and have continued the project there. I re-evaluated the work I had done, and found a bunch of small inaccuracies, due mostly to my lack of knowing how to use form*Z when I started. Since I started with the foundation, all my errors on that were passed throughout the building. So, I’ve started over. This time I constructed the foundation walls and pilasters seperately, unioning them together afterwords. This was easier and more acurrate. I did the foundation entirely based on the foundation plan, and then constructed the first floor columns based only on the first floor plan. I then lined the two up and resolved any inaccuracies. I believe I now have a perfect base to begin working off of. The 15 hours listed for today covers work I’ve done since restarting the project on March 9th. I’ve decided to skip the complex floors for now, and concentrate on getting more of the basic form of the building in place. I will be able to borrow pieces from the earlier model, such as the floor to the large lecture hall (room 170), and later I should be able to use the pans for the complex floors, which will save a lot of time.

So far, I’ve got the foundation, all major floor elements, and all columns done. I’ve also completed the CMU outer walls on the north and south ends of the building.

I was initially taking screenshots into Photoshop, but I’ve now begun using the ‘Save As’ feature in form*Z, which has a PICT option. These images seem a bit nicer. I still take them into Photoshop, resize them to 468 pixels wide (the widest image I will use on this site to remain friendly to all browsers and monitor sizes), and convert them to GIFs. For now I have then used GIFConverter to interlace them, but I’ve heard PhotoShop has that feature somewhere, so I’ll figure that out soon to save an extra step.

I looked a little more at Infini-D, to see how to do VRML models, when I discovered it doesn’t do VRML, it does Quicktime VR. Maybe that’s better, maybe it’s worse. I’ll have to see. Might be cool to do a Quicktime VR in the model, and a real Quictime VR in the same place in our building, and compare them. Also, as soon as I get some reasonable interior shots of the model, I’m thinking of taking real pictures, and using a morph program to morph from the model to reality. Could be a cool effect.

Foundation Walls

Foundation Walls & Columns

Foundation Walls & Columns with Ceiling (Ghosted wireframe)

Foundation Walls & Ceiling

Foundation & First Floor Columns

Foundation & All Columns w/North & South Floors

Foundation, All Columns, and All Floors

Courtyard View of Previous

First Floor, North End w/Recessed Lecture Hall

Same as Previous w/Ghosted Outline

First Floor, West End w/Raised Lecture Hall

Entire First Floor

Outer CMU on North End of First Floor

Same as Previous w/Columns

Same as Previous w/Foundation

First Floor Plan of North End

Outer CMU on South Endo of First Floor

Same as Previous w/Columns

Same as Previous w/Floor

Entire First Floor w/North and South CMU

Same as previous with Second floor pad

The AUP Project

January 31, 1996; Time Today: 3 hours, Total Time: 51 hours

Our copy of form*Z times out today, and it appears we are not renewing it. The primary professor that is using it has been unhappy with it, most likely due to the numberous problems we’ve had that are most likely linked to not enough RAM. I’ve been trying to export the model so I can continue in another program, but have had some problems. form*Z allows DXF exports, but gives an error when I try to export the waffle slab floors I created. It also allows 3DMF exports, but when I import the file into Infini-D all the faces aren’t there. I was able to get the simple form of the model into Infini-D, which I am going to try and use to create a VRML model that I can use for testing. Basically, it’s looking like I may have to learn the AME extensions to AutoCAD and take that model into 3D-Studio. Not what I was hoping. More when I figure out what to do.

The AUP Project

December 27, 1995; Time Today: 3 hours, Total Time: 48 hours

No, I haven’t given up, I’ve just been really busy with the end of the semester here. Today I completed the west ceilings for floors 2,3 and 4 (they’re all the same). I exported the building (just the columns and the simple floors) as a DXF file, and imported that into Infini-D. Infini-D seems to be much quicker at producing simple rendered images with shadowing. It was once I had the model in Infini-D that I realized that everything was in a blue material, the default in form*Z. I went back into form*Z and figured out how to use the ‘Color’ command to change everything (everything I’ve modeled so far is in actuality made of concrete) to a gray color. I’m now playing with Infini-D’s controls, getting used to manipulating the lighting, cameras, etc. so I can shoot some quick rendered images of the concrete frame that now exists.

Quick rendered image of the concrete frame that now exists

The AUP Project

December 15, 1995; Time Today: 4 hours, Total Time: 45 hours

Worked on the lowest floor slab on the west side today. Created the stepped, curved floor of room 110. Discovered a boo-boo that needs fixing. On the floor of the first level, I used the foundation walls as the outer boundary of the slab. Their should actually be an 8″ shelf on the foundation wall, so I will need to subtract 8″ off of all sides of the floor slabs.