December 14, 1995; Time Today: 6 hours, Total Time: 41 hours
Today’s task was to do the floors on the south end of the building. I completed all five slabs on the south east end (which I will refer to as south from now on, I will refer to the south west part of the building as west), and the basement ceiling on the west side.
December 13, 1995; Time Today: 5 hours, Total Time: 35 hours
I completed the complex, multi-sloped floor of the large lecture hall. You wouldn’t understand how I did it if I tried to explain, so I won’t. Suffice to say, it wasn’t easy. As powerful as the ‘union’ and ‘difference’ tools are, they didn’t help a whole lot here.
Floor slab with the sloped floor Previous
December 12, 1995; Time Today: 4 hours, Total Time: 30 hours
Still working on the north half of the building. I completed the top four floor plates. I then started working on the first floor (basement ceiling). It uses entirely different pans than the other floors, and it adds a complexity. The large lecture hall (room 170) has a floor that slopes downward, below the level of the main floor. As it turns out, it has three planes that are not parallel to the main floor. I’ve laid out all the pans on the west side of the floor except for the area where the floor slopes. I’ve begun constructing pieces for that area.
December 11, 1995; Time Today: 5 hours, Total Time: 26 hours
I continued work on the floor. I’ve started working on west side of the hall on the north side of the building. I’ve wasted some time, since I was taking measurements from multiple floors, not realizing there were differences in them. I’ve started over, but I can go much faster with this version since I can use the old one as a template for some of the pieces. I now have this piece completed for the ceilings of floors one through four. I’m still looking at the basement. The drawings don’t seem to reflect the sloped floor of the large lecture hall on the first floor.
Learned another command today. In constructing the floor, I was individually differencing the pans from the floor slab. As the slab became more complex, the differencing was taking longer to do. I couldn’t figure out how to difference a number of objects from one object until I was pointed towards the ‘Join’ command. Turns out you can select a number of objects and Join them to behave as one object, which can then be differenced from the original object. A big time saver.
December 8, 1995; Time Today: 5 hours, Total Time: 21 hours
Started work on the floor above the basement. I’m creating pans, which I will array, and ‘difference’ from a solid slab. The walls of the pans are tapered in 1″ on all sides. to do this, I used the taper command, which made it easy to select the face, and determine how much I wanted it to taper in. The one bad thing about it is that to type in how you want it tapered, you must put the percentage of taper, which I found to be imprecise. Instead, I created a box of the size I wanted the top of the pan to be, and placed it on the top of the pan. I then snapped the tapered faces to that, and then deleted it.
Floor slab with pans
December 7, 1995; Time Today: 5 hours, Total Time: 16 hours
I spent today fixing inaccuracies that I stumbled across, and added the stairs to the south basement. After measuring the stairs (in sub-zero wind chill factors I should add), I found them to be different from the drawings, so I had to do some alterations to the foundation walls I had already constructed. It took four attempts (I kept overlooking small details that made a big difference), but I eventually got the stairs and doorway in. I also added the basement floors.
A student of ours is working on a project in form*Z and is having problems doing hides when his model reaches 35,000 polygons. I’m guessing these problems are memory related, and that I will face them in the not to distant future.
Foundation walls and footings
Foundation with the floor in place
December 6, 1995; Time Today: 5 hours, Total Time: 11 hours
The footings were next. In AutoCAD, I would have used the offset command to help with this, but couldn’t find anything that worked for me in form*Z (I tried the parallel command, but got some really funky junk). I ended up drawing guide lines out from every intersection that I could snap to as I created the solids. This was tedious, but worked well. I then ‘Unioned’ the footings to the foundation walls.
A note on one of the few curves in the building. The west most wall contains a curved wall, which is reflected in the foundation. I was able to find the center of the curve, which happened to be the center of a column. It is handy to use the line command in form*Z, and while it is active, be able to switch to a curve tool, which creates a continuous poly line comprised of straight and curved lines. I created a solid whose outer boundary was the outer plane of the footing, and created another solid whose outer boundary was the inner plane of the footing. I then ‘Differenced’ the inner solid from the outer solid. I did the same thing to form the foundation walls.
December 5, 1995; Time Today: 3 hours, Total Time: 6 hours
I’ve found the manuals for form*Z to be lacking. No index, which I hate. Everything must be found through a table of contents, which is difficult if you don’t know exactly where a command is located in their menus. Also, their are four manuals, and each includes a full table of contents, which lists items to be found in some of the other manuals. In my opinion a manual should not include references in the TOC that refer to other books. Enough with my pet peeves.
Today I worked on the foundation walls. I created the outer plane of the wall entirely from the plans, and created the inner plane from the plans, and from the columns which I had already created (for pilasters mostly). This helped point to inaccuracies in the layout of the columns (couldn’t find dimensions for everything, so I had to pull out a scale and measure by hand).
I created the two separate basements of our building (the basement is divided due to an underground steam tunnel that could not be altered). I then added the shorter foundation walls that connected the two basements, and supported the west end of the building that contained no basement. Each piece was then joined together using the ‘Union’ tool to create a monolithic foundation wall, with the entire foundation becoming one piece. ‘Union’, and it’s opposite, ‘Difference’ are very powerful commands that will be used often.
December 4, 1995; Time Today: 3 hours, Total Time: 3 hours
First day on the project. First time using form*Z. I’ve got a nearly full set of architects drawings of the building (no as builts). I’m going to try and use the drawings, and my knowledge of the building to construct as accurate a model of the current building as I can.
I wanted to start easy, so I took some plans that a student had done of the building in AutoCAD and saved each floor as a DXF file, which I imported into form*Z. I had problems getting the PowerPC version of the Rendering version of form*Z to import the DXF’s (it kept locking up), so I used 68040 Mac with the standard version, which worked fine. I then discovered that the plans weren’t nearly accurate enough to be useful, and had to scrap them. I would have to construct everything off the plans.
I started with the columns on the first floor. The building follows a fairly strong grid, which made things easier. I constructed the basic columns and multi-copied them to save time. Each floor uses the same columns, so I created separate layers for each floors columns, and pasted a copy of the columns on each. One goal is to be able to view exploded axons of the building, so the building will be placed on as many different layers as is needed to expose different floors, and different aspects of the structure and enclosure, as possible.
Four floors of columns
This project’s goal is to construct a 3D model of the Architecture and Urban Planning building on the computer. I, the WebMaster, have aspired to construct this model for a number of reasons. First, the project will provide a model which can be used for a number of purposes, a few of which are: to provide 3D images of the building for tour pages on our web site; to create a model that can be converted to VRML and can be used for live walk-throughs of the building; to provide an easily accessible model of a building which students can view to see how the major components of a building act together. The next reason for embarking on this project is to show what kind of work is involved in converting a set of plans, sections, and details to a 3D model, and the time involved to complete it. Finally, the initial 3D model is being constructed with the Macintosh application form*Z as an exercise to learn the program (what better way to learn a program than to try and complete a project with it). This page will act as a diary of my experiences, both positive and negative, in trying to complete this project. I will try to include images of the work where I can.
The diary is arranged with the most recent entries at the beginning. Use the navigation icons to move to the next or previous entry.
