Context

After messing around with the building itself for so long, with some curtain walls, skylights and material assignment to spare, I decided to move on to context instead for a change of pace:

Context, done by extruding imported dwg files again, obviously.

Travertine steps leading to entrance.

Steps on right porch and water basin.

Sculpture garden. Will add sculptures later.

Test render 1

Test render 2. Now we're talking.

Boolean

Cutting skylights with boolean-subtract modifier:

That is so Salvador Dali I can't stand it.

Hacking....cough.

While hacking my lungs out, progress is made:

Already some interesting shadows are forming...

Ugh.

Working with 3dsmax while having a flu and fever is just fantastic.

This test render looks like a Salvador Dali painting.

Of curves and polylines

Of course, it is necessary to convert all lines to polylines and layers to prevent excessive hair-pulling and cursing. Problem is, splines, arcs and ellipses don't convert to polylines easily. It took hours of trawling through tutorials online and lots of trial and error to get it right. Splines can be turned into polylines by using the FLATTEN command, but ellipses are something else: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=2881972&linkID=9240817

In the end, I tried extruding a single cycloidal vault and test rendered it. This is the result:

Not bad at all, if I do say so myself.

Project 2: Freaking Cycloids!!

My selected building for project 2: The Kimbell Art Museum by Louis Kahn. A modest, dignified building. The floor plan is easy enough to cad out...

...but the real fun comes when cadding out the elevations. You see, the roofs aren't exactly semicircular, they're cycloidal.

Which entails constructing the shape by an annoyingly complex process. Ugh.

For some reason, the method only works for the outer cycloid. When the method was used for the inner ones, they turned out distorted.

Eventually cheated by using an ellipse. Finally, done.

Lights, Camera...

Lighting and cameras, more complexity, more annoyances...

A simple first rendering, with the view to the outside strangely missing...must have been an error...
(EDIT 19/10/2012: I might have enabled "save alpha channel" when saving the image, which could explain the disappearance of the background.)