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| My all time favorite design tool: Blackboard! Collaborative, fast, cheap, Infinitely variable... what more can one ask for? |
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| For the last 5 years Rhino has been my favorite geometry platform. It's got very good scripting and is precise yet very open and flexible to use. Having used a lot of other tools I still keep returning to Rhino. It is not a complete solution for architecture but for all the tinkering and experimenting I do it is very good. At Alsop I used Rhino directly in the beginning of the process, interpreting the architects sketches and paintings into somehting the engineers could work from. I also made various tools to help facilitate the development. At Schmidlin I used Rhino for processing complex geometries and output this as sorted lists in various forms for use in other engineering applications. |
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| Catia is great. The only reason I don't use it all the time is because I can't afford it. I has been very expensive and so, very hard to justify for anything other than large scale product design. Luckily that is about to change with the Digital Project from Gehry Technologies. While working on the Fourth Grace at Alsop, myself and a colleague tried to set up a collaboration between Alsop/Fourth Grace and GT to use Catia as the main geometry platform. During my time at Schmidlin I have used Catia a lot and find it very good but quite demanding. You really have to know what your ambition is before you start modeling. But once you know your algorithms and what you want to build it is a fantastic tool. |
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| Robert Aish at Bentley has been working on this system for quite some time. I came in contact with it on the SmartGeometry summer school in Cambridge in 2003. As a procedural geometry modeler it is very interesting and the ability to detach branches of your tree and compile these into new components is very promising. This may well be the future of CAD, it certainly is very powerful. |
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| I have experimented a bit with photo-based modeling and measuring. Comparing features in a set of images taken with a well calibrated camera to generate relatively accurate points in space. I used it on two small projects, the first was to measure landscape and trees to build the site-adapted mountain bike track. The second was a platform climbing on the edge of a small cliff outside my parents kitchen. |
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| Also photogrammetry, but used a bit differently; to track and reverse-engineer the position of a camera. I use this to combine virtual objects with real footage. |
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| My all time favorite animation and rendering package. In many ways overkill for what I do but a lot of fun to use. |
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| Another recent hobby involves taking series of images of a spoon mounted on a tripod. The images are combined into High Dynamic Range Images i use as image-based lighting in Mentalray and Renderman. In the future I would like to combine this technique with the use of Radiance to produce accurate light-probes. |
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| While at Unto This Last I used Mastercam extensively to do CNC programming. Old-school interface hides a very powerful CAM package. Wrote a couple of custom post processors for it. While at Schmidlin I looked into the NC modules of Catia. These require a bit of work but once you have set up your process and created goof processors for your machines it can be a big time-saver. At Schmidlin we did not have this link, but rather relied on a combination of 2D drawings and Espri with feature-recognition to do the CAM programming. It was a very big loss of flow in my eyes. |
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