Luke Rawicki. ENDS 170. Project 3

Project 3 was the final project of the semester, and likewise, the most time consuming of the three. Between the time it took to construct the house, both mentally and physically on the computer, and the rendering, this project took over a week to complete. When beginning in Revit, and first starting to illustrate my ideas on the computer, I felt lost, yet the tutorials definitely helped when it came to finding the different tools and identifying the various tool bars. Once I gained a little experience, the simplicity of Revit allowed for a lot of experimentation and greatly helped in the design process for my final model. The final house model design for the 106 class was born from the design I came up with in Revit. Once again, I was trying to design something while using my word, "Aggressive" as a model. With all of the regulations and requests given to us by our "client," Project 3 was undoubtedly the most difficult to complete.
My design is meant to portray the word aggressive through the architecture and the site design. The floor plan displays many rigid corners and penetrating walls that clash to create the aggressive feel. It represents the quick movements and spontaneous nature of the word. One who would enter the building almost has to follow the plan set up by the walls which lead you through the house from the living room and kitchen on the first floor, to the bathroom,bedroom, and study located on the second. The most difficult part of the design process was building the model to suit the needs of the client, "Madame X."
With her odd requests, the house was to be built with both private and public spaces that were either inviting or impeding to the guests. The living room and kitchen are both apparent from the entrance way of the house, which immediately sets the public atmosphere for these two rooms. They are open and each of them has a view of the backyard. The bedroom and study were supposed to be places that guests knew not to wander into. I modeled this idea by building walls to shield the view of the bedroom from guests, while the study stands alone. The study (shown in picture above), is separated from the rest of the house by a long pathway that gives the study its serenity and privacy. From this point of the house, the best view can be achieved. It looks over the entire site and into the back yard of the house. It also had to be a design that would invite the guests to not only move throughout the house but also enjoy the garden space outside. In my design, I used a strong wall down the center to lead the guests along its axis towards the back of the site. Once outside, they can enjoy the greenery and the look of the water feature that was another request of Madame X.
Revit was a very easy program to use because a lot of the tools used for creating an object use the same steps for creating almost any other object. Loading different objects and materials used the same steps through the same dialog boxes each time, which makes the modeling process much easier. The drawing window helps you align objects to almost any other object in the picture while making it very easy to switch back and forth from different views to make sure that everything is in the right place. All of the tabs in the design bar make everything very accessible. Each one offering a different aspect, yet making it very similar to every other command in the program. The entire process from creating the property line, to erecting the walls, to capping off the project with a roof was made easy through the use of Revit. The Rendering process has been the only part of this project to really give me problems.

The first rendering to be done was the Solar Study of the house. In this animation, a camera was set up from the Northwest Isometric direction, looking down on the house. It shows an entire day from sunrise to sunset, showing which areas receive light and shadows throughout the day. The second rendering is a walkthrough of my house. Because of the length of time it takes to render one single frame in Revit, I decided to incorporate wireframe portions in my movie. I planned to use the wire frame to aid in the walkthrough of the house by using it as a tool to see through walls. Since my house has many parts that are closed off, it would have been difficult to walkthrough each corridor to view things like the bedroom, bathroom, and entire kitchen. For this reason, I was going to use the wireframe as "X-ray vision" and look through walls at the rooms I avoided in the walkthrough. I use it to see into the kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom. I also used the wireframe for its efficiency in rendering a few parts of the walkthrough that were less informative in the walkthrough process, such as a close up of the front door, and part of the walk up the stairs.

Movie1
Movie2

Luke Rawicki. ENDS 170. Project 2

Project 2 was much more demanding, especially with the complicated forms that had to be illustrated on Autodesk Viz. The challenge was finding the correct dimensions for each shape, and then rotating each shape to resemble the shadows of the photogrphed image. With the angle of the sun casting shadows on July 22 outside of Building A, an identical daylight system had to be set up using the system tool in Viz. Once this was set up, I was able to finish making the forms of my box and proceed to the animation. This, unfortunately prooved to be too much for my computer to handle and never correctly rendered itself viewable. It portrayed a target camera entering the box and then flying and diving around all of the forms inside the box. The frame count in which I used for the first rendering was 900 and this was expected to take over eleven hours and climbing with each completed frame. Once I moved down to 600, the estimated time dropped to right hours, and everything seemed to be working well until my computer some how changed back to 900 frames during a maneuver to make the most of my inadequate time remaining. This then caused jumps in the camera and the repeated paths of the same views.

The second model, which I actually completed first, was an experimental exercise with the forms and the different lights and materials which could be added to the box to cause a more dramatic and exiciting scene. The forms began as failures, and my inexperience witht eh Boolean command left me with perfectly square shapes and disaligned connections between different forms. The Edit Mesh tool relieved these problems and was able to create some interesting forms regarding my assigned word, "Aggressive." With this in mind, I created lights and another daylight system to shine on certain parts of the composition and give this rigid word a more dynamic feel. The wood material template seemes suitable for such a strong adjectve and also worked well with both the mental ray sun and the Omni lights placed in the back of the cube. I experimented with shininess and glossiness, but the existence of these finishes created a more soft feel then what I wanted, and also would make the rendering time for the animation excessive.

Animations: The rendered animations show a fly-through of the cubes shown above. Each animation was created by using a camera path and then adjusting the line to fill the space and show good views of the cube while avoiding any collisions with the forms. The first movie took me a long time to create the animation because I was less experienced with the vertex adjustments. Movie 2 went smoothly and I was able to complete the animaion much faster.
Movie1
Movie2

Luke Rawicki. ENDS 170. Project 1

Project 1, with each composition, developed from a black and white frenzy into a picture with direction. The first composition, with little guidance given from the professor, contained many sharp shapes with almost no relation to one another, and with little concentration on the design process. The design was meant to follow the nature of the word aggressive and portray this through the balance of each of shape. The word "aggressive" is a strong rigid word describing quick, tough, and sponteous movements towards a point. The computer allowed for a lot of experimentation in dealing with this word for once I learned the photoshop commands. I began by trying to copy each shape from the top and dragging it within my composition but I learned this was not the best way.

The second composition represented here was a large jump forward, while being able to rapidly illustrate my thought process onto the screen. I just used the pen tool to draw the shapes onto the grid and this proved to be much more productive. This composition had more direction than the one before but still contained the random shapes that ruined my first try. With the critiques of widening my border and puting more thought to the representation of my word the second composition contained thick arrows that cut through the black space. These arrows entered from the outside and broke up the rigid border, which was not suitable for such a word. The relation between the shapes still needed some development.

The final composition drawn onto Photoshop took all of the critiques, including the balance of black and white, the further widening of the border, and the elimination of the focal points. Along with the remedy of these problems, I decided to add color to the major diagonals that give motion to the composition. The coloring was achieved by using the select tool and then adding the right hue to the different shapes that I felt completed the rotation and gave this composition its aggressive nature. In this final try, the arrows are mostly implied and therefore relate to each other without becoming individually noticeable. The border was separated at the points where the flow of the composition exited and entered. This has become the basis for my final drawing composition in ENDS 106.

Life of the Artist

Birth Date: June 29th, 1989

Currently Resides: College Station, TX

Growing up, I truly enjoyed experimenting with Legos, Lincoln Logs, and Konnex. These organizational "toys" were instruments of the intangible melodies running through my head. These sensuous flows have all affected my work today.

With my first real stab at art and architecture during this summer school session I have been able to explore every dimension of my mind and illustrate these different facets in my artwork.