I spend the morning work time filling in parts of my presentation for the mid-studio critique tomorrow. So far it is a lot of text, so I need to simplify it.

Presentation Link

I also worked with Ammar on Rhino settings and tips for the rendering work I will be doing. I installed a trial of V-Ray, and kind of got it to run, but the texture requires more tweaking and the lighting is blown out even when it is set to a low intensity. I will be using CPU rendering only since I have Surface Book which uses a custom Nvidia driver not supported by V-Ray.

I tried to test out rendering the mycelium texture in Rhino by modelling the coffee table design. I used a slightly modified stucco texture which looked okay in the render mode of the Rhino viewport, but after doing a full render it look awful. I might be able to use a bitmap texture based off photos of grown and dried mycelium, but the ones I have now are closeups. I plan to work a little bit more on getting a better texture, but for now I am going to move on to working on the new modular designs.

Today I started to play around with variations of the basic shapes I sketched for modular furniture. I started with the cube and triangular prism, then stretched, squished, hollowed out, and rounded corners. Once I have a number of shapes I can start thinking about how they will fit together.

I realized that for the renders, some of the pieces look better in traditional perspective than isometric, which I used for the first batch of renders. I decided to rerender everything in perspective so I have both to chose from, and I will use isometric view for diagrams.

Today I made diagrams for the modules. I used the same view as the isometric renders. I made copies of all of the diagrams with hidden lines, but I only think the cylinder needs them, and not even that badly. The dashed lines appear to be different line weights because of the resolution, so I will need to re-export them to fix it or just use the diagrams without hidden lines.

Next I will be putting together the presentation. I plan on making grids of renders and diagrams, keeping in mind that the presentation will only be viewed from small computer screens, not a larger projected screen. I should also probably do more historical/context research.

Today I finished generating structural analysis reports and moved on to renders. I ended up using the solid douglas fir option in Scan and Solve for the wood bases instead of creating a bamboo plywood material.

The rest of my time was spent on creating passable renders for CSW. I know they are not perfect, but they are good enough for my use case. The noise reduction option helped a lot since my previous renders had a lot of noise that I couldn't seem to get rid of. I have the three example configurations for simple modules left to render, then I will move on to getting 2D representations to start diagramming.

Update 4/25: I completed the renders of the three simple module configurations

I thought I should get a head start on diagramming since I realized that I they should probably be completed by the end of Monday at the latest, leaving only today and Monday to work on them. I have two options for the diagrams. I can dimension the models then explode the dimensions so they will transfer when I create the 2d representation, or I can do the dimensions in Illustrator. Either way, I need to use Make2D. The problem is that not all of the lines are complete or lined up in the result. It could have something to do with the workspace tolerances, but I'm not sure.

Today I ran all of the modules and most of the configurations through structural analysis. I generated reports for them, which are posted on the platform as well. I have three configurations left to test because they have bamboo plywood components and Scan and Solve does not have a plywood option by default. I need to create a custom composite material to represent the bamboo before I can run the tests, or I can just say that it is a different solid wood.