A frustrating week with Illustrator...

I found using Adobe Illustrator to manipulate the perspective image incredibly frustrating. First, if I exported a pdf from sketchup shadows did not come along. Exporting a jpg worked fine there, but was much more difficult to manipulate inside of illustrator.

With some help from Dennis and Erin I was able to work the plan view of my Luthier’s workshop as a pdf in AI. Fine and good. Seems to work well once you get the hang of it. My frustrations seemed to revolve more around figuring out the subtly different AI interface than dealing with the image itself.

For the perspective view, I decide to try something totally different... I imported the jpg into Corel Painter IX and repainted it there. I have had this program for some while but have not used it extensively. It works a lot like Photoshop in allowing you to select regions of common color, then then gives you lots and lots of art media to paint on it with. Given this is a first try, you may or may not like the results... but I think the experiment is very successful and has a lot of potential.


The first image here is the plan view of the Luthier's studios generated using SketchUp, transfered into Illustrator using pdf, then recolored and annotated there.

The second image is a exported jpg view from Sketchup of the performance hall. This is what I started with to generate the final image of the Performance Hall using Painter.

UO MAMA's first Art Show...

The task this week was to produce a poster for a first art show at the musuem. I decided that since it is my musem I would select me for the first artist! Here are three images I generated for the poster, getting progressively better I think. The final image is pretty much the one I handed in.

The most difficult issues for me were learning how to make the fade work from side to side. Sounds simple doesn't it?? Well, the default fade has about 10 color steps along it and I only wanted two. I kept sliding the step markers to the left and the right and could not get rid of them! Turned out that you had to pull them off vertically, then they disappeared nicely.

Next there were issues with getting text to show, particuarly against the colored backgrounds and the images I was displaying. In particular the right hand image of Summer was so textured that it was very difficult to show. I played with some white text, black, and red with a black border around it. This last seemed to show the best over top of the Summer image.

I also manipulated some of the wood cut images by doing a live trace on a black and white image, then removing the background paper color to let the sub-layers of the poster show through. In the case of the Yin and Yang cats, I went back and did an interesting gradient fill into the open areas around the cats. In the final version that I printed I removed the white background from the center black tree image which reduced it's glariness a lot.

Finally, I fiddled with the background colors. The yellow-green fade I finally ended up with worked nicely with the colors of the woodcuts and text (especially the Summer image on the right hand edge) and it also fit with the whole UO scheme! Ducks rule!

Photoshop Tennis: The Darth Story

This week the objective was to place your sculpture into a new context using photoshop, then exchange it with a partner who would modify it. After returning it, the originator was to modify it one time further.

My friends who know me well know what a movie fanatic I am. In conversations I am constantly relating stories and situations to old movies. So when I thought of a new context for my Moorish, the monolith from 2001 immediately jumped to mind. NASA has a number of photos from the Apollo 11 moon mission on line. Here I started with the famous earthrise over the moon photo and my SketchUp image. I moved the earth over to where it appeared behind the screen so that it would show through nicely. Dave is played by Buzz Aldrin who used to be standing facing the American Flag. Something in his stance looks rather zombiish I thought.

But then my partner, Kyle, completely outdid me by taking up the theme and running away with it. He transported Dave to the end of the Universe, or wherever Dave ended up. Did an amazing job of integrating my screens into the roomscape, and updated Dave with the latest in stormtrooper garb.

"So what do I do with this??!", I exclaimed? I decided to take the stormtrooper image and continue with it. Perhaps when Dave returned he actually came back as Darth Vader?? I think this storyline would have been a lot more fun than all the Jedi politics in Star Wars III.

It is the next week and I am frantically posting this before my batteries run down. Does that count in my two-hundred words?

I have successfully brought my little laptop to it's knees this week using Sketchup. I first designed a lattice based on one the pictures on Nancy's site that I liked a whole lot...

You can see the page of lattice images above. I chose the second from the top because I liked the asymmetrical nature of the design. It turned into a beautiful lattice in sketchup. I formed tubes that represented wrought iron bars and framed the lattice with a wood surround.

The first thing I discovered was that since lines have no width, you have to encase them in tubes to make shadows from them. Which means that the lattice model was really huge.
But it did make beautiful shadows.

I then added a walkway around my sundial from last week, added several bench models from the standard sketchup parts, and then tried to create small outdoor rooms around the benches using the framed lattice screens. I would have liked to have gotten further but it appears that I need more memory or better memory management or something. Although I was able to do a lot by shutting off layers and working with the remaining components. Still, when it came time to turn everything on and take a picture... it was tough!

Where am I and how did I get here...?

Okay, then. Four months back I was a mild-mannered computer hacker (read dull dull dull) at a stable (read not going much of anywhere fast) high-tech software company. Attempting to eke out this year's 2% performance improvement from my favorite algorithm on my carefully selected set of benchmark testcases.

But *Now* I am part of the exciting new field of architecture! Only, maybe not so new. My assignment (should I accept it?): make a cool looking scultpural something in SketchUp to put in the courtyard of my new museum. (You didn't know I was designing a museum? Well, now you do.)

Here is something then. I've created this sundial sculpture. As you can clearly see in the image to the right, it is 9am in Eugene, Oregon. The image above is taken at 3pm. Below is the sculpture in plan view.

Now what I *really* should do is animate it so that whenever you log in it will point to the correct time. Nawww, not for two credits.