ZedSpace

X–Section: Visualisation.

Zane Egginton — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:53:12 +0000

This year our students produced the first issue of X–Section [blog], an annual student magazine that not only showcases student work but also includes articles by staff and others industry leaders. The following is something I wrote for it, note that you can read the entire publication online too [click here].

A greek quarry.

Visualisation

In August 1998 I landed a job as a technician in the ‘School of Landscape and Plant Science’ at Unitec. I had recently graduated from Waikato University with a Science degree and had a healthy interest in computer graphics, at that stage AutoCAD, Photoshop and a 3D programming language called Pov-RAY. At the time the School had roughly three PCs and three Macs for students in a very small room, which was also my office.

Although I had come in as a technician, from day one I was teaching and within
six months had an official recognition of it in my contract. Since then I have watched the use of computers in the Landscape Department gradually change from year to year. Of course the technology has came a long way. In those early days we got excited about a few rather crude and identical trees whereas now we can produce a forest with relative ease. The biggest change however, is not the technology itself, but the perception and acceptance of it in landscape practice.

Back then, anything done on a computer was seen as computer generated, void of any design process. This was far from the reality but that was how it was perceived. It was a shortcut for those who did not have the time or skill to draw. I remember many students tracing their CAD drawings to avoid
the preconception that their design was done by a computer. That perception has dramatically changed since. Now it is well understood that designing with computers most definitely has human input and in most cases, has become a vital component of the design process.

Designers can also save a lot of time using CAD, however it raises the question: Is that time reinvested in making our rendered images look more realistic? This is an interesting dilemma as it can change the way a design is perceived. A simple line drawing communicates form, however a detailed render becomes a debate about materiality. Most designers would suggest it is self-destructive to present a major project without a bells-and-whistles digital render to go along side it. However, it must be considered what is being communicated and to whom. If the project design is still conceptual, then perhaps it is better to present imagery that suggests just that. If the design is past the point of negotiation then maybe it is time to show the viewer exactly what it is going to look like before construction commences.

This is where some of the new technologies available to the designer can take digital realism to a point that is difficult to tell it from the real thing. Not only that, a well- executed visualisation can show both the final site and the journey that the design went through to be realised, especially when film techniques are employed.

Well-executed design can neither be accomplished purely with or without computers – what should be considered is how they are used.

The worm in the Apple

Zane Egginton — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 04:05:36 +0000

In the last month I’ve had a play with Apples new FinalCut Pro X. My experience has led me to ramble on about Apples current treatment of the Pro market.

FCP-X received quite a lot of hash reviews immediately upon its release, wether they where fair reviews or just negative hype, I wasn’t sure however the missing features where reason enough for me to hold off upgrading. Recently a small project came up so I download the demo version (10.0.1) and with an open mind I launched the app and got into doing what I do. Injest from the EX1. Hmmm, no good. Few work arounds later and I have the files in the bin and ready for editing. But whats this stupid little clip viewer and psychotic canvas? The disappoints continued, and I must agree with the word on the street, this is iMovie Pro. This got me thinking. Whats with Apple and the professional market?

Apple appears to be abandoning its pro market, a market that got Apple through the tough times and continues to promote the platform as a serious computing platform. The pro users where originally from the the print industry but over the years has scooped up many others incl, Architects, Scientists, Musicians, and the Film industry. They’ve been a loyal Apple sector however over the last few years we’ve seen pro software and hardware either disappearing from the shelfs or gathering dust; The Xserve, Shake, Finalcut Server, Color, the current mac pro was released 17 months ago [at time of writing] and now Final cut pro appears to have been derailed.

At the same time apple has heavily pushed into the consumer market, just as Steve Jobs wanted with the original Apple II and Macinosh. To be fair, under the hood OSX is very much a PRO machine, however it would appear that apple is no longer focusing on the pro market like they have in the past. Why should they? The pro market is small and very demanding, and Apple appear to be leaving it instead to the third parties to cater to. Not a silly idea, however I think they’ve got it wrong.

Apples consumer base isn’t little boxes like whats been presented at keynote extravaganzas in the past, its more like a pyramid. With your general consumers at the base and the professional market at the top. Why does a student film maker/architect/musician etc choose Apple? It’s not because it’ll go great with their iPhone, its because the pros use them and if the Pro’s use something else so will students, teachers, friends, and so on. If you lose the top of the pyramid you expose the base to erosion.

The pro market can move quickly if they have to; when Adobe stalled on a release of Premiere for OSX the newly released Final Cut stole market share and then acted as a catalyst bringing video editors over to apples hardware. When Quark wavered Adobe InDesign stole the scene. Apple bought Logic (and later released garage band) which they captured the music industry with (ok the iPod may have influenced this group a little too). So my plea to Apple is this; Sort out the Pro sector.

I have a lot more to say on the subject, but i’ll cut it there.

Another Winner

Zane Egginton — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 03:15:14 +0000

Well it’s been a good month. I received a facility staff award for innovation in teaching and learning (mostly for my use of video and screencasts) and also Won a 3D rendering comp over at Cornucopia3d with an image that took me 20 minutes. Admittedly I used an ice texture I had been playing around with a couple months ago (which I tweaked for this) but I really wasn’t expecting to win it. What happen was that I noticed it was the day the comp was closing and I had less than 30 mins before I had to teach a class, so one quick render and pow.

In other news I finished a Viz job for Skyline Garages to be used on a new website, I’ll upload images soon as their site goes live and we’re working on a very ambitious short film script. This is something thats been in conceptual status for a very long time, and so far it’s pretty damn awesome. All I can say at this stage is that it’s scary and involves a Taniwha, stay tuned. Soon as we’ve finished story boarding it I’ll be setting up a website and we’ll start looking for contributors. Laterz….

Why I bought a 60D over the 7D

Zane Egginton — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 00:09:17 +0000

Recently I bought a brand new Canon 60D ( + 17-135mm lens and a 50mm f1.8 prime). Before you ask, I couldn’t afford the 5D mark II. The 7D was affordable but it wasn’t the cost difference that influenced by purchase. Firstly, the 60D and 7D are almost identical, both have APS-C 18 mega pixel sensors although the 7D can shoot stills at 8fps and the 60D at a little over 5fps. As far as I’m concerned it’s far from 25fps so I don’t really care. The 7D is more rugged, so if I was dragging myself through the humid swamps of Zimbabwe I may have bought the 7d, but I’m not. The 60D is a bit lighter and has a fancy swivel screen making in much easier to shoot in difficult locations, (one of the most compelling reason to shoot on an SLR) the screen can completely rotate protecting it from scratches too, cool. The 7D has auto gain only for the audio and no manual control for levels, the 60D has both auto and manual gain control. The 7D has more auto focusing points, can’t see why I need 19 over the 9 on the 60D, seems over the top to me. The 7D has a shutter response time of 131 ms vs 253 ms on the 60D, which a 122ms difference, this could make a difference for some I suppose. The 60D uses SD cards which means I can use the very cool eye-fi card, the 7D uses compact flash (I’ll post something about the eye-fi card soon). As you can see there’s pros and cons for both, and when you look at these you may still think the the 7D is the best option, I certainly did, but here’s the kicker. There’s a little firmware hack for most canon SLRs called Magic Lantern than unlocks a plethora of features, it doesn’t work on the 7D. I may write something about Magic Lantern at a later date but for now I’ll just say, it rocks! Go and have a read over on the site, esp if you own a canon DSLR. Overall, I’m loving the 60D, although my hard drive would tell you that 18mega pixel raw images are overkill, it may be right. Pics coming soon.

DCP – The end of 35mm film

Zane Egginton — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:32:11 +0000

I was going to right up a bit about the talk I went to last week about Digital Cinema Package, however Damon over at the LastFlight blog beat me to it. Rather than a re-write I suggest you pop over there and have a read. Theres some huge changes happening behind the scenes, so if your interested in how a movie ends ups on the big screen post 35mm prints, I’m sure you’l find it interesting.

What the Flock is going on?

Zane Egginton — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 23:44:42 +0000

I’d like to write something today that is a little off topic to the rest of this blog about the recent riots in the UK [edit: and to a degree the 'occupy wall street' protests]. Theres four groups I need to identify, rioter, defenders, clean up crews, and the police. First we’ll start with the rioters. Whats unique with this group is the way its organised, traditionally a riot was closely associated to a protest thats got out of control. A protest has a cause and is organised by an group of individuals much like a corporate structure, ie a leader, managers, secretary, PR officials, etc. However what we are seeing in the UK is completely different. It’s seemingly senseless, and other than the Police/government theres no leaders, no infrastructure, no event organising, and for most no cause.

So what is going on? We often hear that these individuals are using social media and text messages to communicate, but how can a simple tweet or text cause such chaos? Lets look at the dynamics at play here;

a large group of individuals are communicating with each other,
each of the individuals have no idea of the big picture, ie there is no central control system.
individuals react to the information it receives and to their immediate environment
each individual relays messages to another in their social circle.

What we have just set up is an algorithm (or set of rules) for Flocking. Flocking can be seen in nature, as flocks of birds, schools of fish, or swarms of insects.

The interesting thing with Flocking is that a group of individuals appear to have a collective intelligence, like a flock of birds flying in formation, ants building a nest, or fish avoiding predators. In fact you could look at the human brain in the same way. Each cell is relatively simple, no one cell has any intelligence. There isn’t a brain cell in my head that knows what my favourite color is, they are simply reacting to signals feed to it by its neighbouring cells yet as collective they can store, retrieve, and communicate something as abstract as a desirable frequency of light that entered my eye. Not only that, but this can be communicated to another individual and they can store this information in there collection of cells.

With flocking each of the individuals are generally very simple minded, eg an ant, bird, fish, or a guy wanting a free 50 inch plasma tv however as a collective they can display complex behaviour. So is this what we are seeing in the UK? A collective intelligence capable of complex behaviour that can react to its physical environment. Text messages, tweets, facebook, etc are the catalyst for this behaviour as it achieves instant one to one, one to many and many to many communication. Setting up an incredibly complex algorithm for Flocking. In contrast traditional communication between individuals has been too slow or too limited for something like a spontaneous riot to form, eg news papers, phone calls, or screaming at the top of your lungs.

Whats interesting is it’s not just the rioters that are behaving like a flock, there are the people defending their neighbourhoods and there has even been spontaneous clean ups. But how do we control these seemingly organic collectives? This is where a lot of research needs to be done, not of the individuals but to how the collective reacts to its environment. What outside influences can re-divert the collective behaviour? With these current events we need to study what was being communicated between individuals and what effect that had on the bigger scale. It’s all very interesting and incredibly complex. Have a google about some of these concepts, I’m sure you’ll find more interesting facts on the topic.

Disclaimer, I don’t claim to be an anthropologist, psychologist or similar. The above needs further research and is based on my own general knowledge.

Thomas Heatherwick: Building the Seed Cathedral

Zane Egginton — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 23:06:29 +0000

As I mentioned in my last post about AppleTV, last night my wife and I spent a few hours watching TED videos. One of these was a presentation by Thomas Hetherwick, a London based Architect/Designer (http://www.heatherwick.com/). I was already familiar with his work however it was nice to see what he’s been up to lately. One thing I and many of you will appreciate is his ability to tie Art, Landscape and Architecture together to produce some truly outstanding design solutions in ways that’ll blow you away, utterly amazing.

AppleTV is cool.

Zane Egginton — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 22:03:27 +0000

A couple of my friends have AppleTV’s and love them which got me thinking, why? I’ve known about the AppleTV for some time however I never bothered to even try one out. I wasn’t impressed with the maximum resolution of 720p, no record feature (as in other hard drive PVRs), no analogue output, no dvd player, no keyboard/mouse, and generally couldn’t see the point, why not just plug your laptop/ipod in to your TV directly or even better; get an old computer thats not much good for anything else? However in the weekend I finally got one. The first two shops didn’t stock them and at the third place the salesman said they didn’t have them although 5 mins later I found one on a shelf with the iPods. The AppleTV is impossibly small and setup is a little painful as you have to put in iTunes and wifi details using a small [yet very sexy] remote rather than a keyboard. Okay so now that you’ve got the power, hdmi and the wi-fi setup what does it do?

On the unit itself you can browse trailers and rent movies, a little expensive ($5 – $8) for what they are; ie not as good as blu-ray quality and there doesn’t seem to be any bonus material but admittedly very convenient. The trailers alone are awesome, a massive and well ordered collection. Haven’t rented a movie yet, but I’m sure I will one day, at least to try it out. There’s free content from YouTube, iTunes (podcasts), flickr, internet radio stations, + more, and you can also browse content from computers attached to the network (via iTunes and iPhoto). All very cool. You can also send audio and video from your computer/iDevices, which is actually very impressive. At one stage I was playing music from my iPad and photos from my laptop at the same time, wirelessly, again very cool. I believe with the upcoming iOS5 things will be even easier to send to the AppleTV including the entire screen of your iDevice.

My wife and myself spent all last night watching TED podcasts (mixed up with the occasional wise words from Karl Pilkington), looked through the family photos, listened to BBC4, and played music all without a computer. The $170 (NZD) AppleTV really is the missing link in your digital lifestyle and is probably the most underrated device I’ve come across, I’d give it 8/10 if I was reviewer.

FilmCAD 2011 Videos

Zane Egginton — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:09:45 +0000

Just a quick post. Uploaded all of the student videos from a paper I teach @ Unitec to YouTube. You can watch them all here. The Paper also has a blog if you want to post feedback; filmcad.wordpress.com. There will also be a screening @ Unitec on the 11th August. I’ll post more details ASAP

Steve Jobs presents new Apple campus

Zane Egginton — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 12:37:38 +0000

Just found this. Its Steve Jobs presenting a second Apple campus they intend to build to the Cupertino City Council. It’s a round low rise building with massive curved glass windows that will hold approx 12,000 employees while incorporating a huge 135 acres of lanscaped grounds. The design dramatically minimizes surface parking and even goes as far as using plant species ingenious to the area.You’ll also see the council members attempt to get free wireless, tell Jobs how much they love their iPads and ask if they can have a Apple store. Talk about a easy crit session! It’s well worth a watch, this is what Apple can do when they apply their design principles to Landscape and Architecture.