New Website! New Blog!

New Website!

Designed by Mattias Forsberg from Humblebrag, a digital design agency based in Borlänge, Sweden. It runs on Squarespace which means it should work nicely whether you are looking at it on a browser, smartphone or tablet. I'm very happy with it, and hope you like it too!

Mattias has also helped with my branding (woo!), so if you are a facebook user, feel free to check out my updated page there, and expect to see a new logos/profile pics appearing on twitter, flickr, vimeo etc.

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New blog! - Scrapbook

Ever since I started using google reader (RIP) I've been keeping a visual collection of images that inspire me and give me ideas for composition, colours, mood etc. and also as a way of remembering cool projects.  The name, concept and probably a large part of the content is of course is inspired by Andy Matthew's Architecture Pastebook. Thanks Andy, hope you don't mind! I'll try to be strict with my tagging so that it's easy to find images, and am also going to make sure that the photographer in question is credited and if possible a link to their website or portfolio. If you want to know more about the project or architect, you'll have to dig a bit deeper, by clicking the image itself.

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Old blog

I think I have successfully ported over all of the content and comments from the old wordpress blog, and the new layout means that images can now be bigger and clearer.  I hope to find a bit more time over the next few months to do some more tutorials and other new content.

I also want to thank Johnnie for his fine work on the original website and 6 years of brilliant support, zero downtime and all round excellence.

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T & S: From Bits to the Lens

Crazy that it has been 3 years already since Alex Roman released his seminal film, The Third & The Seventh. It still sets the standard for arch viz films, and arch viz stills too for that matter. Looking forward to receiving my copy of the book. Well done Alex!

www.thirdseventh-book.com/

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.thirdseventh-book.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "From Bits To The Lens" Book -- Beautiful 120+ hires imagery artwork, philosophy and processes behind the shortfilm in a 232 pages large format book. Help funding my next shortfilm through the book. All the book sales incomings will be destined to financing it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .Fullscreen it, please. A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal. Credits: CG |Modelling - Texturing - Illumination - Rendering| Alex Roman POST |Postproduction & Editing| Alex Roman MUSIC Sequenced, Orchestrated & Mixed by Alex Roman (Sonar & EWQLSO Gold Pro XP) Sound Design by Alex Roman Based on original scores by: .Michael Laurence Edward Nyman. (The Departure) .Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. (Le Carnaval des animaux) Directed by Alex Roman Done with 3dsmax, Vray, AfterEffects and Premiere.

Tind 3d print

Received a lovely little memento of the Tind project through the post this week :) Thanks everyone at Claesson Koivisto Rune!

Tind Dusk

A quick study of my favourite of the 3 Tind houses for Claesson Koivisto Rune. For me this is where making everything in 3d really pays off, being able to open an old scene up and do something completely different with it in a matter of minutes. The renderings of course, took hours!

I used sky 0902 for these dusk renders, but with a very low colour balance on the camera to make it look more blue.

Glenstone

I'd like to think that my best work is always my most recent work, but I'll freely admit that that's not always the case (you don't get to see the worst ones I'm afraid!). This is a project though that I am really proud of, and am pretty excited about being able to finally share. It's a new museum building by Thomas Phifer & Partners for the Glenstone Foundation near Washington D.C., which also features a landscape design by PWP Landscape Architecture. I'm not going to say much more about it just now, apart from that this is 3 of 22 images, the remainder of which I will publish once I get permission. I think I am also going to be doing a short talk about how I did all the landscaping, and other bits and pieces at the next State of Art Academy Day in October.

Sky used: 0902

Sketchup Extensions

With the recent release of Sketchup 2013 and its brand new extension warehouse it seems like a good time to do a round up of my favourite extensions (or as I used to refer to them, plugins). There are hundreds of extensions available but these are the ones I actually use regularly. I'm looking forward to discovering new ones through the extension warehouse as it makes extensions more accessible and easier to use. RoundCorner

RoundCorner is great for adding bevels and fillets to geometry, in fact I prefer the workflow to how you would normally do it in 3dsmax.

As sketchup doesnt have any kind of modifier stack though, I like to 'hide' the non modified version of the object inside the component. As it is hidden it won't be exported as geometry and it allows you to go back easily and make changes. In the image above, I have a hidden copy of the window frame 2m to the right that I can move back into place and redo the bevel/fillet if needed.

FredoScale

A great plugin for doors and windows, you can take a group and stretch it but retain the width of the frame. In the image below, the original door is on the left, the fredoscale stretch version next, and the scaled one on the right. It can do a LOT more but I just use it for this one function.

JointPushPull

Push pull non planar surfaces! Occasionally a god-send, for example extruding terrain surfaces (pavements, roads etc). Can work according to the surface normals or on an axis.

Instances

Right click a component, 'select all instances'. Very handy.

BezierSpline

A whole set of curvy line drawing tools. Can also divide up splines into equal length segments which is useful when making contours.

Curviloft

Good for simple lofts between two lines.

ComponentStringer

For copying components along splines. Useful for stairs, balustrades, fences etc.

ShapeBender

I recently had to make some curved windows, this plugin made the process very simple. Make your component as usual, then draw a curve to bend it, easy!

I haven't had a chance to see which of these extensions are available on the new extension warehouse yet, but will update this article with new links once they are online. Might also add new handy extensions to this list so feel free to let me know which ones you find handy!

Finally, if you are new to Sketchup, Ronen's blog post from 2009 9 Sketchup tips.. is still essential reading to get you off to a good start.

HDRi Skies - Mourelas Konstantinos

A beautiful image sent to me by Mourelas Konstantinos (@mourelask on twitter) which uses the very dramatic 1853 sky from my collection.

Moody sky, fog, trees... ticks all the boxes for me. Love it.

More about the image here.

Free HDRi Sky* - 3DArtist Mag

Completely forgot about this until I got sent a copy of the magazine, but 3DArtist Magazine has one of my skies on the cover disc courtesy of 3DOcean.net.

It doesn't mention my name anywhere but it is indeed one of mine so maybe a good chance to try a HDRi sky out if you haven't done so already.

The sky on the disc is '1928 Dusk Sun'

*when you buy the magazine for 6 quid

Tind by Claesson Koivisto Rune

Some of my favourite images from a recent project for the Swedish company Fiskarhedenvillan which was designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune.

(thanks to The Urban Alaskan blog for letting me use the snowsteps image here)

Many thanks to Design Connected for their help with the furniture used in this project. Almost all of the pieces of furniture are designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune themselves:

and the remaining items were:

Any other props were either supplied by the architect or come from modelplusmodel. The logs next to the fireplace originally came from evermotion I think and I then put them in place using MassFX in 3dsmax.

As usual all images are lit by my own HDRi skies without any additional help from a vraysun. The actual skies used were:

White House exteriors: 1614 White House interiors: 1008

Black House exteriors: 1614 Black House interiors: 1614

Red House exteriors: 1123 Red House interiors: 1008

As always you can find the full set on flickr.