Buy the Mug, Drink the Kool-Aide

I have succumbed to the pressure to commercialize. Now you too can own a buildz mug, complete with the best bizarro Revit journal comment.

Of course, with the holidays coming up, you will also want to stock up on buildz apparel:

Halloween Hangover

A word on pumpkins: We all seek perfection, whether it is in mathematics, words, community, whatever. In form and form making, the ancients found perfection in rational shapes: circles, squares, and triangles . . . and people, somehow. Frank Gehry likes fish, Frank Zappa likes tweezers and poodles. For me, it's pumpkins. They are earthy, but technicolored. Lumpy and irregular, but unmistakably characterized by a rhythmic segmentation. They embody the Vitruvian ideal of Firmness, Commodity, and Delight.

This is the pumpkin I did last week, with the "bulge" parameter at 16', 8', and 4':

Download the rfa from here

Happy Halloween!

The folks in the mail room here at Buildz Plaza have finally dug out from under the sacks of pumpkins we received. The Buildz Subcommittee on Vegetable Affairs has met and, in cooperation with the Buildz board of directors and several of my other imaginary friends, reached consensus. We agonized and argued over the multitude of entries, but the winners of the First Annual Buildz Pumpkin Internationale are as follows:


Baddest: This award, for the pumpkin that exemplifies the spirit of Shaft or Johnny Rotten (as opposed to Lex Luthor, or rotten meat), goes to Rob Cohee. His Inventor Pumpkin terrifies and thrills, while being an entirely quantifiable solid. Follow this link to see Rob's process (amplified by Drowning Pool).

Goodest: This award, for the pumpkin that gets to the wholesome essence of Jack O' Lanterns, goes to David Light. Made in Revit, this is the pumpkin the Code hath made. It is true to the premises of it's platform, free from hacks and workarounds, and pleasingly reconfigurable. See David's dissection here

Mostest Parametric: This award, for the pumpkin that is shaped by rules and variables, that is definite yet infinitely flexible, goes to William Lopez Campo. William didn't submit any geometry per se, but a Grasshopper definition, a series of rules and operations that boil the complexity of the ancient arch of sculpting a vegetable into 26 slider controls. The core of his submission was this pile of spaghetti:

Which can be interpreted into any number of geometries:

Fantastic work Rob, David, and William! Because all of our winning contestants have well formed solids, they will each receive a 3d print of their entries.

In addition to these submissions, I'd like to give a shout out to several other awesome pumpkins that stood out from the crowd:

Robert Manna, who pimped my journaled pumpkin with a series of parametric voids for a variety of expressions.

Chico Membreno, who submitted the most livable Jack O' Lantern

Joe Kendersky, for his classic sensibility.

Arman Chowdry, whose World Halloween Centre just defies description. Really, I mean, holy crap Man. I think this is the stadium where the Intergalactic world Series of Shaving Cream and Toilet Papering Vandalism takes place.

Thanks to all who submitted pumpkins. Additional images and files are available to download from here.

Happy Halloween!

Talkin' Smack O' Laterns

So some folks at Inventor are saying that no one can do parametric pumpkins like they can, that in competition with Revit "It wouldn't even be a fair fight". From the Revit side, there have been responses that would make my Grandmother say "I told you not to run with that shady crowd of workplane based ruffians!" Any response from Max with some mad modifiers? Can Grasshopper put down these self important feature based trash talkers? Perhaps a Blender based bonanza of blobby booleans?

Only four days remain, who will take the schwagging rights? Send em in by noon on Thursday!

And for anyone who wants a starter file for Revit, here's a journal to get you rolling.

Instructions:

Unzip folder, drag and drop HH.txt into your r2010 desktop shortcut, and hit this link for musical accompaniment.

Parametric Pumpkin Carving!

I'm having a Pumpkin Carving Party, and you're all invited! Prizes will be awarded for The Goodest, The Baddest, and The Mostest Parametric. Submit entries from whatever platform you are comfortable in, Revit, Blender, GC, Rhino, digitized macrame, whatever. There is no judgment here among our, uh, jurors. The winner will have their work showcased on these pages, and receive a complimentary piece of soon to be designed Buildz schwag. Entries must be received by 12 noon EST Oct 29. Winners will be announced at midnight Halloween night.

So crack open a beer and turn those ones and zeros into sculpted vegetable goodness. Post entries to zachkron@gmail.com, at least a screenshot, but feel free to send models, journals, parameters, videos, scripts, whatever, modeled in whatever you like. If you have some huge file, please send a link or let me know and we can work out some kind of upload. If there are less than 5 entries, everyone wins!

Hi Ho Coffer Dome!

Psst, hey kid . . . want to make the dome of the Pantheon in 220 seconds* with revit 2010?

1. Extract the contents of this .zip file to a folder on your machine
2. Identify the file pimpMyDome.txt
3. Put on your headphones.

4. drag and drop pimpMyDome.txt into your Revit 2010 desktop shortcut.

5. while revit is starting up, click on this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkymTHSbWe0

When it's all over, inspect the folder were pimpMyDome.txt was, you get a PRIZE! A freshly baked parametric coffer panel!

If this fails, or you don't have revit 2010, or if you are a low minded BIM pragmatist who can't be bothered with the full glory of watching a journal file play your Revit installation like the elegant, precision instrument that it is, you can get the low fidelity video of the event here (play full screen, please):

*Caveats:

Times may vary depending on processor speed and RAM

Shut down any other sessions of Revit before starting.

Running these .txt file journals in Revit is a fickle process. Sorry if it doesn't work.

If you run it once, you have to remove the Coffer.rfa that gets spit out at the end before running it again.

Banksy yer Buildz: Inkscape

Since Banksy has been doing his thing for just under 20 years, it's high time architects got in on the act. And so I submit to you, that if Banksy can stencil a building, so can we!

First, do yourself a quicky render, keep the shadows to a minimum using the patented Buildz Middle O' The Night Render. I like to speed the whole process up for this technique by setting the quality of rendering in Revit to Draft, copy the settings to custom, then crank up antialiasing to 6. Fast and textured, but with some volume, kind of like a good cheap haircut.

Now, download and install Inkscape, "An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator". This application is fabulous, and a handy tool to have for anyone messing around in the visual businesses. And it's free. Open your exported render in Inkscape, select the image and go to Path>Trace Bitmap. In this dialogue, you will be presented with a number of options to create vector artwork from your render, but Brightness Cutoff is the fastest path to Banksydom.

Play around with different setting for variations, you can get the idea pretty quick.

Enjoy!