CAD Tools
#1: Blackboard
|
|
My all time favorite design tool: Blackboard! Collaborative, fast, cheap, Infinitely variable… what more can one ask for? |
Rhino
|
Rhino is my all time favorite geometry platform. It's got very good scripting API 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 Architects 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. |
|
Catia
|
|
Catia is great. Catia is expensive! While working on the Fourth Grace at Alsop Architects, 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 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. |
Generative Components
|
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. |
|
Photogrammetry
|
|
Experimenting a bit with photo-based modeling and measuring: Photogrammetry. 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. |
Automated Camera-tracking
|
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. |
|
CAM
|
|
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. |
Image-based Lighting
|
Some experiments with taking pictures of a spoon(?) → lightprobe. The images are combined into High Dynamic Range Images i use as image-based lighting in Mentalray, Renderman and Radiance. Radiance is tough work to get right but the results are pretty useful. |
|
