Jacob Zimmer - ENDS 170 Project 3

Project 3 consisted of exporting our Revit model of our house to Autodesk Viz and apply realistic textures and lighting. This was a fairly simple process; Using a combination of preset materials and pictures I found, I went through the house applying them to objects, hiding layers that blocked them. Viz makes this process rather easy by applying a given material to all objects in the same layer at once. However, for objects like the walls, I had to use the EditMesh modifier to select specific parts of specific walls to which I would apply a material.

For the background, I encased the entire scene in a huge cylinder and reversed the normals so that the materials applied to it would render. I then applied a tiling grass material to the bottom face of the cylinder and a picture of the sky onto the vertical faces. I deleted the top face. This provided a convincing horizon and sky, and the tiling of my grass texture was not too noticeable. For lighting I applied a skylight outside to simulate daylight, and used omni lights to light the inside of the house.


We were required to render 2 external views of the house at 800x600 resolution, one as an aerial view and one from eye-level.

external rendering one:

This rendering shows the front of the house, most prominently the exterior of the foyer, dining room, and green roof. I had some trouble getting the exterior of the house to be light enough, but enabling final gather solved my problem.

exterior rendering two:

This rendering is an eye-level perspective taken from outside the master bedroom and facing the south side of the house showing the exterior of the living room including the patio and awning. The background treatment is especially noticeable in this rendering, and in my opinion it works well with the lighting of the house.

We also were asked to render two movies: an aerial fly-around and a walkthrough at eye-level.

fly-around:

This movie was relatively easy to make. We were required to use a free camera. I first made an oval path using splines and constrained the camera to it. I oriented along the correct axis in relation to the path and rotated it to look slightly downward. I then set the length of the time slider to 300 frames and set a keyframe at the end with the camera having traveled 100% of the path.

walkthrough:

This movie was more complicated than the fly-around, but I did not encounter any problems setting it up(rendering is another story). This time we were to use a target camera. Again the first step was to make a path using a spline and constrain the camera to it. Also, like the fly-around, I only used one keyframe for the camera animation, which set a smooth speed all the way through. The downside to this, in hindsight, is that the outside potion of the movie feels slow in comparison to the inside due to fewer turns or changes in view. After the camera was moving at a comfortable speed, I animated the camera's target(largely from the top view watching the results in the camera's viewport) using autokey and creating a key every 25-100 frames. The result of using a camera on a path is a smooth animation that easily avoids jumpy turns or running through walls.

Sample movie:

Jacob Zimmer ENDS 170 Project 2

Our second project was to create an analytical image of our design based on our original Revit model from the previous project. This included adding inhabitants to the house to represent the social activities that might take place, as well as showing context and deciding on a style of presentation.
My image shows the public areas of the house, with people socializing inside and outside the living room while another brings some snacks from the adjacent kitchen. I went about creating the image by using a section box in Revit to restrict the visible parts of the house, then positioned a camera so I would have a perspective view. I then used Print Screen to transfer the image to Photoshop. In PS I cropped the image and added more realistic textures and images to the background to make the site come alive. This contributed to a more realistic style, along with the color and added shadows from Revit. For the inhabitants I simply searched for the image I wanted and used the lasso tool to copy them into the house and then scaled them appropriately. I have had some experience with PS in the past so it was not difficult to achieve this image. Photoshop is of course a well established program and is sufficient for most manipulations; these were well within its capabilities. With such a broad range of options though it is sometimes hard to find simple tools.

ENDS 170 Project 1 - Jacob Zimmer

As our first project for ENDS 170, we were to model in Revit the House design we were working on in our design studio. That assignment was to design a behavioral setting located in College station, Texas for a handicapped client. Points to take into consideration include meeting ADA guidelines, airflow through the house, and lighting.

Revit was an overall effective program for this project. The interface is easy to get used to and there are many readily available tools to perform the most common actions. While the learning curve is not too steep, a beginner user such as myself is frequently confronted by confusing errors. Fortunately, most of these are able to be corrected after the first time. I currently am not satisfied with my Revit representation of my design, and will continue to refine it if time allows.

FIRST P0S7!!!

3d goggles out of trace paper dont work.