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AEC Newsletter archive:
Geoffrey Moore Langdon
CADENCE AEC Tech News # 47 (April 1, 2001)
AEC Tech News 4/1/01
In This Issue:
New AIA
SwapDrive
Orbimage and Terraserver - Satellite Site Photos
Students Design Hogwarts School
Author of GDL Cookbook coming to the USA
Accurender
New AIA.org Site
In something like the forth complete redesign of how the AIA offers services online, the American Institute of Architects now strives to be every architects startup web portal with a customizable interface very similar to the news-portals such as MyNetscape, MSN, MyYahoo, and others. In recent years the AIA has had numerous discussions on how they could offer services valuable enough to attract the 50% or so registered architects who are not yet members. For decades many architects have cited the expense of membership (including having to pay even more for each person in your firm) the requirement of having to also join (and pay for) a local chapter (which, in some States, doesn't do much) the high additional cost of AIA legal contract documents and spec services, nebulous lobbying, and trivial learning opportunities all as reasons to forego having "AIA" (which the public identifies as credentials of "Architect") following ones name. Dissatisfaction with the AIA has even led to an alternative organization called the Architects Council of America.
With the new myAIA portal, the AIA is highlighting its new approach of numerous free and inexpensive services specifically for members, to make joining really worthwhile. The recent flurry not only of new electronic technologies (CADD, design software, extranets, online collaboration tools, online learning) but also new materials and building technologies (titanium cladding, resurgence of energy/sustainable/green architecture, etc.) as well as the need for help in our increasingly litigious society (with ADA, environmental impact, alternative project delivery where architects are in less control but even more liability) all herald a new era of needed information exchange for which the AIA plans to be at center stage. Over the past year, the AIA has made dramatic changes - reducing and even eliminating the costs of ordering online specs, special contract documents, added CADD tutorials, and much more - and apparently this new myAIA portal, besides vastly reducing the AIA's costs, will give their members access to all that. The portal includes the ability to customize its news interface to alert you about construction projects bidding in your area of expertise and other tidbits that may truly make it a morning must-startup screen for all architects.
DesignPACK on SwapDrive
Similar in most features to www.xdrive.com and www.idrive.com web resources where you can store files offsite by uploading them to a web site (mentioned in AEC Tech News 36), SwapDrive extends those features by allowing you to purchase far more space (at about $7.50 per 100meg/month) and includes an online viewer/redliner for AutoCAD and other drawing files. At $75/month per gig of storage, SwapDrive could easily serve as a construction project extranet - sort of like a Bricsnet or Buzzsaw without all the features - appropriate for offices who already document things like change orders, punchlists, project photos, etc. in some other way. The new DesignPack viewer/redliner gives a small office the ability to get a review copy of drawings to their clients efficiently, without the hassles of trying to email attachments, or set up FTP sites.
Orbimage and Terraserver - Satellite Site Photos
In another case of a new competitor coming along with a "value added" paid version of another free service, Orbimage is now offering high quality satellite images at costs around $7 per square kilometer. For the past four years I have regularly used the free Microsoft service - www.terraserver.com - to get preliminary site photos (and contours) for various architectural design projects. Microsoft originally set up the service to demonstrate that WindowsNT indeed could host a terrabyte (or more) of info online - hence the double meaning of "terra". Terraserver sells their high quality images too, though as a typically frugal architect I normally just snag the images from screen captures while online. Apparently both companies get their images from the now de-classified Russian sputnik databases, thus, areas the cold war regarded as "interesting" will be well covered and recent, while many areas are totally ignored. In my case, Beverly is well covered (because there is some sort of radioactive research facility) but Beverly Farms (some six miles away) is not covered at all. I normally take the images - both the actual photos and the overlayed contour maps - into AutoCAD2000, enlarge to appropriate scale, and trace the buildings and roads I need. The Terraserver site also offers an automatic 3D site software which takes two photos of the same area taken from different angles and produces accurate 3D site models (usually used for flight simulators).
Langdon Students Design Hogwarts School
This semester the project that has lit a fire of enthusiasm among design students at Mount Ida College and Endicott College is the 3D design, rendering, and animation of the imaginary castle used for Hogwarts School in the Harry Potter series of books. These advanced CADD students have already had projects in AutoCAD, DataCAD, ArchiCAD, VectorWorks, DesignWorkshop, ArchitecturalDesktop, IntelliCAD, and more. The idea here is learning how to Design with CADD. The students were divided into the four houses of Gryphindor, Slytherin, Huffelpuff, and Ravenclaw in a ceremony and are currently designing the great hall, Hagrid's cottage, the potions and herbology classrooms, custom furniture (chairs with claw arms, doors and windows with detailed mullions, tables with feet, fireplaces with unique character) and common rooms in the style of their particular house. It all requires very advanced 2D CADD and 3D modeling, custom texture-mapping, and animation, and the students are doing it all with the $75 ArchiCAD keys they each run on their own systems at home. To get detailed custom objects in ArchiCAD, a designers choices are 1) parametrically adapt something from the standard library, 2) buy a parametric object from ObjectsOnline, etc., 3) build it piece by piece with the slab tool, 4) create an object with "visual GDL" - i.e. build with slabs and save rotated parts as gsm objects, 5) import objects created with other solid modelers (FormZ, AutoCAD ACIS, and 3DS are favorites), 6) write GDL programming code (the least favorite option), or 7) use internal macros such as Profiler (free from Graphisoft site) and ArchiForma ($125 add-on). After "doing it the hard way" using all those other techniques - the clearly preferred way to get all that unique design detail into ArchiCAD is with ArchiForma. Another benefit of ArchiForma is that the unique objects become part of the plan file - not separate library objects - making it easier to transport the drawing to multiple stations (for network rendering and use at home).
David Nicholson-Cole Author of GDL Cookbook coming to the USA
This April, the guru of ArchiCAD GDL, David Nicholson-Cole of Nottingham, England, is traveling around the USA giving seminars such as "Fear GDL no more" and "Make GDL work for you". He is in Boston at the BAC, April 17-18th, continuing on to Baltimore, FL, Texas, and more. Check his schedule by calling your local ArchiCAD dealer.
Accurender with Radiosity
Users of Accurender, which is part of Revit3 and is available as an add-on to Autodesk ArchitecturalDesktop, now see a huge increase in photo-realism with the addition to radiosity algorithms in addition to the raytracing, and texture mapping the software had previously. Radiosity calculations solve an entire scenes light levels and bounces all at once, and include subtle effects such as the glow of one surfaces color bounced off another. The result is an extraordinarily realistic rendering of an imaginary 3D CADD space, including the nuances of light, AND the added benefit of speed - subsequent images are almost instant, making dynamic walk-throughs and animations of photorealistic spaces possible.
Online AccuRender Training
Check out the free online tutorials (in Word and PDF format) on AccuRender and radiosity from accustudio at http://www.accustudio.com/forum.htm
Links :
The AIA = http://www.AIA.org
The Architects Council = http://www.architectscouncil.org
SwapDrive = http://www.swapdrive.com
Terraserver = http://www.terraserver.com
Orbimage = http://www.orbimage.com
Hogwarts School Castle Project = http://www.architecturalcadd.com/id314sp01project.htm
GDL training in Boston = http://www.intcad.com/support4.html
Online AccuRender Training = http://www.accustudio.com/forum.htm
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About Geoffrey Moore Langdon, AIA
Prof. Langdon is a registered architect and is the principal of Architectural CADD Consultants, a firm that specializes in helping architectural firms with computing and CADD. He has taught Design, Solar Energy, and Architectural CADD at a number of colleges in the Boston area. He is the author of Architectural CADD: A Resource Guide to Design and Production Software Appropriate for Architects, a guest speaker at many AIA events, and the founder and organizer of the Designers 3D CAD Shootout competition. contact him at aectechnews@architecturalcadd.com, or through his website: http://www.architecturalcadd.com
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