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Troy(on the left) is a structural engineer… licensed and everything. I asked him to generate a finite analysis of the surface to see how much it could hold. Instead he just put a heavy metal locker on it. It is all made of 2pli chipboard and is surprisingly strong, but I still think it is Photoshop, no one actually saw it since it was 3:00 am. The myth begins…

This is a podium prototype… check out the post below or follow the action live @ : GAUD++

These are shots of Rob and Troy building a full scale mock-up of a podium for the GAUD student work show this semester. Very exciting!!! The show is called GAUD++. I am teaching an independent study course at Pratt that will curate the show. All of the tooling for the system is automated through MEL… then the parts are laser cut. This prototype took approx. 4 hours to cut (the clips take a while). You can follow all of the non-stop action through the course blog GAUD++.

The guilty party is: robert_beach; sean_dugan; jason_mcgee; andrew_seskunas; troy_zezula

Interior of the prototype

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Simple MEL script that tiles an object to a quad poly-surface. The object must have a lattice deformer with 2 divisions and clusters for each set of the lattice points at the corners of the lattice. The script rotates the object normal to a face of the surface and then uses the clusters to distort the object to fit within the edges of the face. The surface must have uniform polygon distribution. It does not work if the edge of one face has multiple adjacent faces. Check below for a brief tutorial on how to prep the object for tiling…

Source:TileToSurface.mel

How to prep your object >>>

Here is a flash movie that uses proximity to produce overlapping waves. The code is a little dirty and inefficient. I promise to clean up the next one… just like Windows.

Source: wave_1.fla

Check out the *.swf >>>

In 2007 the Dom in Cologne installed a stained glass window designed by Gerhard Richter. The window is made of 11,500 “pixels” randomly generated by a computer. It was fairly controversial when it was installed. It seams that some of the church establishment would rather see a more figural image. I thought the design was interesting. The church is filled with other stained glass windows and everything is sort of revealed as you walk through the cathedral, because of the complexity of the space. The first thing you see is the light cast by the window, which is the same as the other windows. Then you see portions of the window and you might assume it is another pictorial image until you are in the transept and you see it in its entirety. Of course, it is also nice to see something generated through relatively modern techniques in such an old space. The building itself is one of the most amazing buildings I have ever seen, and you could argue that any subversiveness of the window works simply because it can’t compete.

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Well blogging in Germany is the same as in NY, either way you have probably had too many of something.  I figured since I took a wrong turn on Delancey and ended up in Cologne the other night, I don’t have to follow local custom.  So this post will go into the general category since it doesn’t contain any explicit lyrics or geek talk.

 The gallery (Galerie Brigette Schenk) that is organizing the logistics behind the sculptures in Cologne had a Marliyn Manson show last June. The gallery also has a couple of Warhol’s, of guess who!!!! Charles Monroe… wait I’m confused. Anyway I was there today and it was amazing to see these to pieces side by side leaning against the wall. All of Manson’s work is watercolor and actually pretty nice. Commodifiers unite!!!

I am heading to Cologne tomorrow for a week. We are scouting out local resources to fabricate a scultpure for an artist in New York. I am going ahead of everyone else to do a little research. I just found out from the person who will be picking me up from the airport that Rosenmontag (the German equivalent of Mardi Gras) will be going on the day I arrive. Well… hopefully Cologne is more like Louisiana as for as research is concerned. When you are building infrastructure and/or politicin’… research covers a wide range of activities, especially during Mardi Gras.

This MEL script is pretty simple right now, but it is being developed to produce sketches for the sculpture to be installed in Cologne. The current brief is to produce a 3 dimensional shape out of “randomly” placed sticks of wood. The wood needs to follow a higher order piece of geometry, but the rotation and scale can be less specific. As of now the script will rotate an object and constrain it to each face of a QUAD polygon surface. Then it produces an interface to rotate and scale each object based on a randomly generated multiplier (the multiplier is specific to each object). You can use any object or group to duplicate along the surface.

Source:OBJtoSurf.mel