Final

For my final in ENDS 170 I worked with "processing". To start off, I went through some tutorials on processing.org to learn more about the program. I then decided what I wanted to do, which was create a program where little circles could be manipulated by the mouse(such as move them around and stuff.) It doesn't sound too horribly difficult except I wanted to do it without the mouse ever actually touching them. So I tried some ideas and none of them worked. Wondering what to do, I found a website with a physics library that was just what I needed. I then started to work with the particle system introduced in the physics library. First I tried to move my circles around using springs, but I could never get it to work very well. I then tried reversing the attraction force and it worked! After some tweaking on the force of the repulsion, amount of circles, and making walls at the edge of the program, I had my program. So what now? I still had some time before the final so I started messing with random and loops. I wrote several more programs dealing with certain aspects of them. One creates random colored rectangles according to the placement of the mouse. Each rectangle is piled on top of another. To do this I set it to loop and reduce the size of the circle by 1 every loop until it I did the same concept again except the rectangles appear at random places on the screen at random sizes and shapes and slowly turn the page white. A third program was created with 3 dots on a white background. When the user clicks the screen, it seems as if the dots are bouncing around the box. This is using random in a loop with background replaced during every loop. Because of this the screen is cleared after every circle is created, making it look as if it is bouncing around the box. I wrote one program just on loops. It is a blue circle that gradually gets smaller, looking as if water is draining. reached 0, at which point it starts over. Overall I learned a lot from writing in processing. I have never really programed before and I feel that I have made huge improvements over the past few weeks. At first I had to constantly check at how to setup the programs. On the last few programs I rarely had to look at an example and was writing based on what I had learned as opposed to what the website said. My programs may not be the most complex ever created, but I tried to make them interesting by making them interactive with the user. This showed me that I can actually enjoy programming(against my first thoughts) and I see there is more art in it than I previously believed.

water cutting

So I sent of to ESAB cutting systems to get some samples, but they never came! O well. What interested me was the water jet cutting system. By what I can gather it can cut like a plasma and laser cutting. It even mentioned stone! The machines are giant and can be converted to plasma cutting as well as water. Beyond that there wasn't much interesting information the site besides the specks of the machines. I'm really sad I didn't get my samples.

Combinformation

Recently I worked with the program Combinformation. It is a program that searches through search engines such as google and yahoo and collects pictures and text for a collage. I looked for items relating to visualization and consumer produces. I have been interested in product design for some time and so decided to see what I could find. My Combinformation didn't come up with very specific pictures or text but I expected that. I have worked with Combinformation several times for different classes and though it brings up lots of relevant pictures for broad topics, the more specific I get, less quality and quantity pictures show up.

NURBs

Ok so I love NURBs. At first I just made random objects and shapes and stuff. I then looked over and saw my roommate's chess set and thought"I wonder if I can make a chess piece?" So after a few false starts, program crashes, and trying to figure out what I was doing, I created a few cool chess pieces. I then made a camera and made it look like the pawn was in a bit of a predicament. I rendered ambient occlusion and then with a polished stone effect thing. I overlapped them and got my final rendering

TED Talk

I just watch a few TED Talks and the one with Cameron Sinclair was pretty much amazing. It was inspiring and made me really want to make a difference. I've debated for a while on if I want to go into Viz or Arch for grad school. The TED Talks bring up the same problem I have been dealing with. Though I can make decent money in Viz if I try, I don't feel I can really change the world with it. Cameron Sinclair really made me want to pursue Arch because of ow much it can change the world. I might be slightly delusional in thinking I can, but it seems it would be a waste to pursue a career purely for money. I also watched the Hans Rosling and Jeff Han talks. They were both really interesting. Hans Rosling was interesting because its a little crazy how much the world has changed and how statistics and information can be displayed. Jeff Han was interesting but it also made me think how useless the equipment is when people don't have homes and food and water. I think I need to watch the others at a different time. Overall they were all really good and I will watch more as soon as I have a free moment

TED Talks

Maya Tutorials

After countless hours setting up Maya and watching the videos, I was frustrated beyond belief. Then I found the example files and it all started falling into place. Stephanie and I sat down at about 1 o’clock and started working. It was a lot easier with another person because it helped to talk about what was going on and usually one person got it. So the first thing we wanted to learn was depth of field. The tutorials used a cool robot to explain it. First we learned what it was, which is to make an image look more realistic by adjusting the focal distance of the camera. After that we learned how to connect a camera to an object and find its distance to put into the depth of field. Then we rendered it and saw that it was really grainy. To fix it we adjusted the contrast threshold. I adjusted a section from the buttons on the robots chest to the eye. I did not change the whole image because of the time it would have taken to render it all would have been substantial.

Global illumination

On to Global Illumination! We spent a while learning about how to use the global illumination settings and they were fun! GI is when light photons bounce around the image. This makes the image more realistic because it picks up color from other objects and carries it to slightly color the surrounding objects. The things with GI is that it took a lot of tweaking numbers to get it to look right but in the end it really looked cool.

Overall

Ok so overall that took a while. For me and those disk and maya and everything, it just never all worked at the same time. It finally did all work and I did some cool looking renderings and learned a lot more interesting things than I thought I would starting out. My favorite would have to be depth of field. Even though this is a fairly easy item to add to an image, I have some strange love of it. Maybe its the really cool robot, maybe it was my first major thing to learn from the tutorial(after spending hours learning things I didn't use and didn't really need to watch at the moment), maybe it is because I love the contrast between blurry and sharp. Who knows? The thing I do know is that I learned some really cool techniques from this tutorial and I can learn more from it(when I have the free time, which is rare).

Final Project

For my final project, I think I am going to do something in processing. It seemed fairly easy to work with and the tutorials were decent. They didnt fully explain everything but I would go back and change numbers to see what it was controlling. I think I could do something very interesting in it. I want to create a program thing that is controlled by mouse movement. I saw a really cool one done in flash that had spheres moving around whenever the mouse came close to them. I dont know if I can do something that complex but that is the general idea that I am going for.

processing

I just downloaded and started working with processing. I have not done much programing before so it was really interesting. I went through several different tutorials working on building up the complexity of what I could create. I worked through learning some basic commands and ideas. In the end I understood what I was doing when I would type out something. I probably could not create my own very easily because I still do not know all of the commands I have learned by heart and would probably need more complex ideas to make something interesting enough to watch or mess with.

processing.org

Masters

Ive been looking at going overseas for my masters. After looking awhile, I found Kunstuniversität Linz in Austria. It is the Austrian Univeristy of Art and Design. For a masters degree, they have a few different options. If I wanted to pursue architecture, I have that option, as well as several options in the Computer Visualization field. I have been to Austria and it is a very beautiful country so there is another plus. On top of that I wanted have a smaller class setting than at A&M. At Kunstuniversität Linz the ratio of student to teachers is 5:1. The total number of students in the university is 774. These different things make Kunstuniversität Linz look very appealing. A beautiful place to study, smaller classes, and studying outside of the U.S. make Kunstuniversität Linz my choice for graduate school.

Kunstuniversität Linz

GDC

GDC is the Game Developer Conference. It is held once a year in San Francisco. It started in 1987 and has grown from 20 people to 12,500 people. The conference features speakers on different aspects of game development, how recent games were created, and awards. The most interesting aspect I saw was a few speeches on Indie Games. There was one on how to take your game developing from a hobby to a business. They also give out awards to games bases on peer to peer voting. Overall the conference looks to be a way for every type of game developer to see what is coming next and how to improve their business and skills.

AGCG

The other night, me and a friend decided to drop by the Aggie Computer Graphics club to see what was happening. I was nervous since it was the first time I had gone and most of the members seemed older. That and I have little skill in programming. Once we got there, we found out that two other guys were there for the first time and were sophomores, so I relaxed a little bit. The guy in charge talked to us about the fact that we don't need to know a lot about programing because they would help explain things. After that he gave a little presentation on a few new projects that the club would start. They are starting an open source flash program for campus that looks really interesting. I have no clue on how to really start programming, but I am going to join the club and learn as I go. As far as what I like about the club; it is small and they seems to know everyone, it goes with my major, and I can talk to the older students about problems and they can teach me new things. As far as things I don't like about the club; I have no clue what I am doing(that is more a personal problem), I don't know anyone(another personal problem), and they do not have the best presentation skills(I wasn't expecting them too). Since most of the things I do not like are personal, and can be fixed by spending some time in the club, I am going to join and see what I can learn.

Artfest

For my submission I picked two pictures I had taken. One is of victoria falls and the other is the water in a creek in the rockies. Both of them, I believe, are decent photos. My favorite part of the falls is in the bottom right corner the rocks and river at the bottom of the falls are barely visible through the mist. The water picture I like because of the crisp detail of the water at that instance in time.

Degree Plan

So here is how I plan to waste my life away the next few years. As you can see I rarely have an extreme work load. One of the sophomore is going to be long. When u calculate in that the labs and stuff it will be about 24 hours of work. O fun. Besides that not much exciting is happening as far as my degree goes.

Mind Mapping

To map my mind I first got a really sharp xacto knife. I then removed the top portion of my head, took pictures, sewed it back together, and looked at the pictures. I posted the best one of the group. For some reason it seems that my brain has a love of caffeinated products and sleep. I also noticed that my brain is very white for the most part, but in certain key areas has a wonderful array of colors. Its interesting considering most the pictures of brains seem much more complex and mono colored. I guess I am just that special.

K3D

Over spring break I worked with the program K3Dsurf(k3dsurf.sourceforge.net/). I couldn't really find any tutorials. The ones I found you had to be invited into the forum, so I just messed with it and learned as I went. I am not much of a math person so the calculations where a bit difficult to figure out what was going on. After I made something that I liked I put it in Autodesk Viz and rendered it. When I put it into viz the front layer was always transparent and I couldn't make it stop doing that so the final rendering came out looking funny. I then put my renderings into Photoshop and blended them. K3d surf was a very difficult program to do a really unique model. I spent most of my time trying to figure out what in the world was going on. I would add part of an equation here and there, look at the model, and try to figure out what I just did. Maybe if I was decent at math it would have been easier, but it is not my strongest subject(its right up there with foreign languages).

rendered tower

The building I created and rendered is a very tall building( as you can tell because the man is pretty much a dot). I first designed it in Autodesk Viz, then created an ambient occlusion rendering, followed by a color rendering. I then put both of these in photoshop and blended them. I added a second layer of ambient occlusion because it made it look more realistic(in my opinion). After that I added some green and a few red flowers to my gardens on the top of the building, added a human scale figure, and that is how it got to where it is. I then tried playing with the glass rendering and lights, like Stephanie, but could not get it to work. I talked to her and found out it was because I did not turn the multiplier on the lights up high enough. I finally got it to work. Its not very good but its a start.

Tower

My tower I started working on is a design after several ideas failed. I was also having a problem with the zoom for a while and I don't know why. Anyways, the tower has an open top, maybe for some gardens? besides that it is 500 units tall and has 10X5 unit windows.

Fishy

So I decided to make a fish out of paper. I went to the pet store a few weeks ago and wanted to get a big-eyed goldfish thing but you have to have a 10 gallon tank. Well paper fish don't need a tank, or a bowl for that matter. I built the fish, that we will name Sammy, in TopMod. It took a few tries to get it to work right and it crashed a few times too. Finally I got it how I wanted and got it to work in Pepakura. I then printed it into a PDF and colored it in photoshop.




After cutting it out I glued and taped for a while and Sammy was born! It was so exciting. He then went swimming through some boxes in studio. Sammy is now asleep cause of his long,tiring day.

Models

So I have been messing with TopMod for a while now. My favorite feature is the rind modeling feature. So far Ive created several different models to try out different ideas. Some have worked and some have not. My favorite part of this whole project is rendering the model. It looks ok as a model in the program, but it takes it several levels up when it is rendered with ambient occlusion. I have been messing with the dept of field but have not had it come out right yet. Here is what I have done so far.




This was my first try at modeling and rendering.









This is my favorite of the ones I have done so far

wmmna

After looking over wmmna.com I decided I like it but was not overly impressed. The layout was fine though some of the subjects where a little hard to read. Some of the post were interesting and some were not. Maybe with more time reading and searching I would be more impressed but at the moment if I had randomly stumbled upon it I would have moved on after a few minutes.

More Menus

For this draft I added the train graphic in the top left corner. I also adjusted my colors to match alittle better. I moved some text around too make it easier to read and I enlarged the address of Coffee Station

Article

The article I chose was about a Buddhist monk community. It was designed to have as little environmental impact as possible. The monks living quarters are scattered over a hillside and most of the paths are defined by existing trees. The article seemed to take from the simple aspect of the building. The spaces between sections are large and everything is spread out and simple. The colors, though not seen in these pictures, were earthy and all the pictures had about the same coloration.

Color

On my menu for Coffee Station, I went with several different colors. They are, for the most part, earthy colors with some soft blues for contrast. I used these because Coffee Station had many warm, earthy colors, and a few brighter colors here and there. As far as pictures go, I am currently working on several pictures of trains and train related material. Once I am finished editing them, whichever I choose will go in the top left corner to tie the menu to the theme of the coffee shop.

the future

Coffee Station Rough Draft

On my rough draft I decided to go with a 8.5X11 front and back, because they are the easiest to handle. The establishment is fast paced around the counter, so it would be easiest to keep the menus in order.

O architecture

So I just finished reading Michael Meredith's "Notes for those beginning the discipline of architecture" and the article on Vault.com. After just spending hours and hours of work on a project and turning around to having another one due, these articles were slightly disheartening. The articles did not tell me something I did not know, they just put it in writing. Meredith's paper was actually uplifting at some points. To have someone know how you feel is always uplifting. But besides that it was a little of a downer. Knowing my friends and family will more than likely never understand is depressing. To know I am going to be searching for the problem and answer for the rest of my life is depressing. But the vault.com makes it almost not seem worth it. While my friends who spit back answers and solve problems by a series of steps will be making lots of money I will put my heart and soul into my work, workings long hours, and more than likely be payed poorly for it. It almost doesn't seem worth it at times. But they say do what you love and the rest will work itself out, and I love what I am doing, so I guess I just have to hope the rest will work itself out.

InDesign

My favorite tutorial was how to wrap text around a picture. This could become very useful on future projects.
How to:
1. Put picture and text into document










2. Use pen tool to draw around the area that you do not want the text to be in.
3. press ctrl+alt+w and decide how you want to wrap your text










And that is how you do it.

Courthouse-Eugene, Oregon

After seeing the courthouse in Eugene, Oregon, I realized how mundane courthouses today have become. Though in their time they were symbols of power, today the same building evokes a feeling of historical pride and lack of connection to modern society. The courthouse in Oregon does not make the observer think lack of connection. It is a very modern building with sweeping lines and new materials. The interior is also very modern, while still keep a sense of dignity.

IBA/Arup Tv Tower

The IBA/Arup Tv Tower is a massive tower under construction in Guangzhou, China. The structure is suppose to be done in time for the 2010 Asia Games, which are being held in Guangzhou. The tower is like a bunch of smaller buildings on top of each other with hanging gardens in between. Each of these gardens are design according to its place in the tower. The building is created to look like a human form, with a wider base and top, and a smaller waist area. At the moment the building is being compared to "The Vortex", but I personally think that the Tower is much more beautiful and graceful, compared to the Vortex which, in my opinion, is rather bulky.

Wikipedia link
More Pictures

Editting Blog

So I have been working on editing my blog. I found a site with really cool free fonts. I started creating a header in photoshop and have been trying to figure out how to insert it into my blog. Once I figure that out I can really get going on editing.

Parametric Modeling

http://parama.sourceforge.net/research/FormFollowsComputation.html

Parametric modeling is a type of modeling that uses ideas, such as sketches, and helps convert them into models. Revit would be an example of parametric modeling. Parametric modeling helps convert ideas by having parameters in which to work. The user can set sections to change according to what changes around it. It also works with objects instead of geometric shapes, so it knows when the object is a door instead of just a rectangle.

In the article, the author also talks about the language of computer programming. He describes it as a non-verbal language like any other art. This is a new concept to me. Usually I think of programming like a math or science, whereas the author talked about it more like literature.

Overall, the article was way over my head at most parts. At some points it did not feel as if I was reading english. When the author did get through to me, it was an interesting article, but for the most part it was a confusing experience.

Open Source

So you know was open-source is. You don't? Well open-source is software that has its code available, for free, so that users can change and adapt the program to better suit their need. This type of software changes very easily, making it keep up with the end user better than corporate made software. Because of this many of the programs used on the internet are, at their core, open-source.
The problem with open-source is that, to have input into the process, you must be able to program. Because of this problem, many open-source programs are not mainstream user friendly. Many of the programs are written for computer geeks by computer geeks(as opposed to corporate software, which is usually written for mainstream users). This causes some problems but overall open-source software is better for the user. One possible solution(in my opinion) is for programmers to get input as well as give input. Many write to improve the software for their own personal gain, but if they possibly looked into some ideas and improvements that non-programmers have, they may find ideas that will benefit them as well as the less computer savvy users.
`Overall, open-source software is an amazing concept and practice. It is evolution for software. With so many people inputting onto the programs, the programs become like living organism fueled my mass brainstorming. There is constant improvements and innovations and it keeps growing into something new and more adapted to its purpose

breakfast...mmmm tasty

In photoshop tennis my opponent was Stephanie. Our rules were no time limit but one or two changes to the picture. We went 10 rounds and in the end I believe I won(ok maybe not) and we had a good time playing. We started playing at Sweet Eugene's so we decided on breakfast as the theme (the donuts helped stimulate the brain/stomach to this conclusion). Stephanie started off with pancakes and cherries and you can watch the progression from there.(Every picture is a different volley.)