Nurbs

Nurbs, which stands for Non-Uniform Rational Basis Splines, is an option in the 3D program Autocad Viz. Nurbs are known as tools that model surfaces and curves. I wanted to make a four leaf clover, so I began by placing points on the page, which made curves. The four leaf clover was flat so I proceeded to the shell command and the uv loft surface, which gave my object depth. Once I finished making the clover, I rendered it. I messed around with the ambient occlusion command and sent it to Photoshop. I used the multiply command and mixed it with another color render that I had worked on by using hue. The images above show what I created!

Talks Frans Lanting

Talks Frans Lanting: A Lyrical View of the Earth
This video shows the great story of our earth being formed into what it is today. Lanting gives us an idea of the possibilities of how the formations on earth occurred. As Lanting's work shows, the earth's surface was molded by fire billions of years ago. This was followed up by the formation of oceans that was caused by heated geysers that produced water all over the world. Since this time, water has been the basis of all life on earth. Ages later, the water at the poles of the earth froze which caused the shaping of earth's edges. As the earth has aged since its beginning, life has gradually grown more and more complex. Plants and animals have diversified from very simple organisms that were here at earth's beginning. “Growing up became a lifestyle.” Earth's development makes for an amazing story that Frans Lanting is able to legitimately tell by using interesting facts and images. I absolutely loved the video and the ideas that Frans Lanting shared on the evolution of life.

“The whole animal world today lives on a stock pile of bacterial oxygen that is cycled constantly through plants and algae. And their waste is our breath and vise versa. This earth is alive and it’s made its own membrane, we call it atmosphere. This is the icon of our journey and you all here today can imagine and will shape where we go next.” – Frans Lanting

Talks Jeff Han

Talks Jeff Han: Unveiling the genius of multi-touch interface design
I watched this video on Jeff Han, the creator of a multi-touch computer screen that has the potential to take over the computer mouse. Han made the multi-touch computer screen with high resolution at a low cost and most importantly, very scaleable. The most interesting aspect of it is what you can do with it. There is no manual necessary; it’s all interaction within the screen and makes things do exactly what you expect. In the demonstration, Han starts off with showing the audience a lava lamp, then goes through a process of photo-editing. The open source version of Google Earth was my favorite feature. Han started off with the earth and zoomed in from different views and showed how the multi-touch screen could see through 3d very quickly. NASA uses the open source version of Google Earth and I think that’s really interesting and reliable. “This is the way we should be interacting with machines from this point on” said Han.

Revit

Revit is an Autodek program that I used to design a building. I followed a long tutorial that guided me through the steps on how to use Revit. The whole process took a good amount of time, but I definitely think it was worth it. There was a lot to learn about the program, but the tutorials made it easier on me. I feel like I have a good grasp on how Revit works but there's a whole lot more I could learn for it. I use to only work with AutoCad when designing things, but thanks to this assignment, my options have grown a lot. I feel like I will be using Revit a lot more often and the advantage of knowing the program is great!

Visual Mind

Visual Mind is a program designated to help you in your daily work, whether your purpose is business or personal related. Visual Mind is a program whose purpose is to help when organizing thoughts and ideas. It's like the simplest program to use. In my visual mind I made five different categories of important things. From those categories I designated branches that described each one more in depth. I also arranged them by color and shape so it would be even easier to understand whats going on in my life.

Final Project Proposal

For my final project, I plan on working with interior design. I think that interior design is a very important aspect to a building. It establishes conceptual direction and shapes the experience of the interior space. VRay is a program for interior designing that takes photorealistic renderings. I want to design, through VRay, either a living area or a game room that would be found in a house for a family. For now, I plan on studying the program through research, tutorials, and examples so I can get familiar with it. Overall, I would really like the outcome of my project to be worthwhile. A lot of time will be spent on this project, but I hope that the results of my work turn out great so I can use it for my portfolio!

Sketchup

It has been almost two semesters since I first started working on SketchUp but I have yet to get more familiar with it. Though I have done a couple of tutorials and know the basics of the program, I wanted to get more acquainted with it. Searching around the SketchUp Google Tutorials website, I found a tutorial that caught my eye.

Textures: Using Photos will teach you how to distort images so they match surfaces in SketchUp. Through the usage of moving simple pins found in each corner of any image, one can easily stretch the image to the corners of any model and when all four pins are correctly placed, the photograph will be distorted to fit the geometry that you picked.

I really like this tutorial because I had no idea that this feature could be done in SketchUp. It is nice to know that any image that I pick can be transferred and rearranged to fit into a symmetrical form within the program. The example that the tutorial used was really cool. Everyone watch it! Also, there are other tutorials for more basic texturing in the same SketchUp Google website found at the top of my blog.