o video do nosso projeto para o Costa do Ipê Parque shopping.

Algumas imagens do projeto acima...

O video promocional feito pela Zeus Ltda para o projeto do Costa do Ipê Parque Shopping

Hi Tonino,

There are several ways to do that, some automatic some not. Usually I prefer to recreate the curves manually, because imported DXF curves have too many vertices, and it gives very complicated models. I prefer to model with few vertices, then if needed, complexify automatically with a subsurf modifier. But in either cases, what you would do is more or less this:

- copy 2 curves above the existing ones (so you still have your original curves below)
- create 2 lines that join the endpoints of the two copied curves. So you form a closed contour
- select one point of that contour, then Ctrl+L to select all the others
- Alt+F to fill the contour
- do the same with every 2 curves, then put everything back into position, then Mesh -> Remove doubles

Hope it helps!

Hello! I'm a novice with blender, and you look so experienced... Tell me some ways to give surface terrain to curves. I imported a dfx file with terrain curves (polylines), I gave Z value to curves, but now? how to make terrain surface?
tonino.abis[at]gmail.com

A little test with gimp GAP... Seems pretty cool once it is correctly configured (specially keyboard shortcuts for frames navigation). The only big problem is that there is no undo. The bad cropping of the anim below is a direct consequence of this...



Based on this tutorial: http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Advanced_Animations/

Impressive work causin...

São Paulo, Rio, Paraty

November 2011

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See this album on Facebook

Commenting post 152: Well done! Very detailed!

Commenting post 152: definitivamente cada vez me sorprendes mas con tus trabajos.te felicito y te mando un fuerte abrazo desde Mexico.

Existing shopping animation

This is another animation we did to show the first phase of an extension project. The main building exists, and was modelled from photos. All made, modeled, rendered, composited and edited in blender.

Hotel animation

This is the animation the previous images were taken from. Project by Coltro Ferrari Arquitetura. Enjoy!

Hotel renderings

A couple of renders for a hotel project. 100% blender internal... The full animation is available here. Project by Coltro Ferrari Arquitetura.

Comic-style arch render

A hand rendering I did yesterday for a building in São Paulo. The main building is based on a quick 3D rendering (no textures, just a sunlight and a bit of ambient occlusion), the neighbours were just drawn from scratch (a bit too quickly I admit) using photos as references. Since the viewpoint is in reality impossible (it would be inside a building on the other side of the street), there was no way to use real photos anyway. Project by Mario Francisco Arquitetura.



Other images done later...

Linux for architects

This is a little introduction to Linux for you architects who have never tried it, but would like to know what's all the fuss about it and if it is really usable for working with architecture. If you know Linux already, I'm sure you'll find a lot of missing info in this text and find it maybe a bit too enthusiastic, but we are whowe are, aren't we...

This article is a sequel of another short article I wrote back in 2009 to present some tools available to architects on the Linux platform.

Just a small note, What it is exactly?

Actually it's wrong to call Linux Linux. Linux systems are not all-in-one, monolithic things like Windows, but rather a complex assemblage of software pieces, Linux being only the base block.

Linux is based on Unix, its predecessor, and follows a basic Unix philosophy: Rather than having one huge all-in-one application that does 1001 tricks, have 1001 small applications that do each one one simple task, but do it well.

Most of the other pieces come from a project called GNU, that's why those systems are usually called GNU/Linux and not just Linux. But let's make it simple and continue to call it Linux.

Of course make those thousands of small applications all work seamlessly is not a small work, but fortunately it has been done a lot of times already. This is where comes what we call a Linux distribution, which is a complete operating system, based on GNU/Linux, made of hundreds of little pieces, all working in a big symphony. Ubuntu is one of the most famous Linux distributions.

First things first, Why Linux Is For You

• Linux is free. This means not only that you don't pay anything, but also that you are free to do what you want with it: download it, distribute it, share it on bitTorrent, (you caneven sell it), without having to do anything or report to anyone. Like GNU people use to say, it's free like freedom, not free like free beer
• Much more important than being free, it will stay free forever. Like most free software, its code carries a license that prevents it from being bought by a firm and stop being free.
• Your distribution doesn't only provide you with the Linuxoperating system, but with almost any piece of software that runs on Linux. As a consequence, all your applications can be installed easily from your distribution's servers, and your whole computer, not only the operating system but ALL yourinstalled applications, are updated automatically.
• Linux inherits another very important thing from Unix: The rock-solid built-in protection of networking, files, processes and users. As a consequence, Linux is almost invulnerable to viruses (there is no Linux virus known today) and easily protected against network intrusions.
• Linux and most free applications that runs on it are programmed and maintained by people who have no commercial reasons to do it. They do what they think is best, not what they think will sell better. Your software will never force you to buy a new computer (Linux and most free software run fine on very old hardware) or a new plugin, and software evolves extremely fast (new features land on your system almost every single day).
• People who make free software are extremely social. You find them easily, talk to them, discuss, share ideas, and easily get involved in directions your favorite application is taking. All happens through forums, email discussions, chat rooms or facebook pages. If you miss some feature and you can convince people of the importance of your claim, chances are high that someone will implement it.
• Linux can safely be installed side-to-side with another operating system such as Windows. A menu will then appear, at boot time, to allow you to choose which system to boot to.

The Bad

Of course nothing comes without disvantages. Here are a few issues you might expect:

• Bleeding-edge new hardware might not be totally supported yet. Nobody has commercial urge to make Linux work for your particular hardware, so you usually have to wait until some Linux programmer will get one for him, be annoyed be the fact it isn't supported, and remedy the situation. It's always a good idea to test before installing or investigate before buying.
• Windows software doesn't run on Linux systems. You will need to get used to other applications. But most of the usual ones have one or many excellent or even much better alternatives in Linux, and nowadays more and more applications such as Google Chrome, Firefox or Open Office can run on both Windows and Linux. Some more specialized commercial-grade applications such as engineering applications still don't have a Linux alternative, though. You will sometimes need to do some homework and find workarounds to palliate to that situation.
• There is no firm behind Linux. Nobody to call, nobody to complain to. Although some firms may offer you tech support, you are on your own in most cases. But fortunately most answers are very easy to find on the internet, a simple search like "How to resize a picture in Ubuntu" will usually give you an easy and immediate answer.

So what does it look like?

If you managed to read until now, you must be a bit curious to see what it looks like, right? I gathered here a couple of screenshots from the most common distributions:

Below is the latest version of Ubuntu, probably the most famous of all Linux distributions, and one of the most friendly to new users. In this version, Ubuntu introduced a new way to navigate through your files and applications, called Unity, which is the vertical bar containing icons on the left:



Another very good distribution is LinuxMint. Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, so it inherits all the qualities of its father. But its developers put a special effort into style and design, so Linux Mint is often the favorite distribution used by artists:




This is another of the most famous ones among new users, called Fedora. Fedora is derived from a famous commercial Linux system called Red Hat, and it inherits from it a great deal of novelty and power. Fedora is usually liked because it brings bleeding-edge features faster than the others:



But most Linux systems are deeply customizable, and you can usually make your desktop look like your wildest dreams. Here is, for example, a screenshot of my own desktop:

How to get it

Most Linux distributions have a great feature: The installation CD is also a Live CD, that allows you to run your Linux system entirely from the CD, without installing anything. This is a great way to test, to see if it runs well, and if you like it at all, without risking to do any harm to your current system. The proceeding is very simple:

• Download an .iso CD image from one of the distribution sites indicated above. Sometimes they have several flavours, such as 32bits or 64bits. Choose one that suits your computer. Since a full CD image is a big file (700Mb), Most of them allow you to download it via bitTorrent if you prefer. Some even provide DVD versions, which include more pre-installed applications.
• Burn that image on a blank CD. Be careful, burning an image is not the same thing as copying a file on a CD. Simply copying the .iso file on the CD won't work, you must either right-click on the .iso file and select a "burn this image to disc" option, or open your disk burning software and find the "burn disc image" option. When your disk is burned, it will contain several files, not the .iso file.
• Now place your fresh CD in your CD drive, and reboot your computer. On some systems, you must allow your computer to boot the CD before booting the Hard drive, this is usually done by pressing a key (F2, F12) during the first seconds after powering up and selecting your CD drive in a list.
• Your new operating system will now boot. Remember that nothing is copied to your computer, so you can play safely with everything, there is no risk to harm anything. Just remove the CD and reboot, and you'll be back to your original operating system. But remember too that nothing you do while you are running from the CD will be saved, so you will loose any work you do during that time.
• Most Linux distributions, when running from the CD, will have an "Install to Hard Drive", icon, which you can use when you are ready to install. You will then be taken to a step-by-step install procedure.

Now where are the file explorer, the internet explorer, the windows messenger, the acrobat reader, photoshop, skype, notepad, word, excel? Well, almost none of those are there, but all have at least one equivalent. Explore the menus and you will find everything in no time. And if something is missing, it can easily be installed by the system itself.

This is, for example, the Ubuntu software center, from where you install just about anything:

Okay, after all this bla-bla, what about doing architecture work?

The problem you'll encounter with Linux is that none of your usual architecture software will work. No Autocad, no Revit, no Archicad, no Vectorworks, no 3DS Max, no V-Ray. Those are all windows-only (some run on Mac too), and it's very unlikely that their developers will want to spend time in doing a Linux version in the near future.

So, how bad exactly is the situation?

Actually it is not bad at all, but you will need to learn to use new software, there is no way to avoid that part. Apart from that, it is actually possible to work without any problem.

2D CAD

In the 2D CAD field, we have a couple of options now. Some are totally free, like QCad,Cademia or the new and promising LibreCAD. Those, since they are maintained and developed by a community, might lack some commercial features like DWG format compatibility. This is LibreCAD:



We also have several commercial applications, which are not free, but run natively on Linux, and have all the features that you would expect from a commercial application, such as DWG compatibility and technical support, like Ares Commander and BricsCAD. Here is BricsCAD:



And, since a couple of months, we now have a free AND commercial application called DraftSight. DraftSight, although owned by a company, is distributed for free, and supports DWG format natively:

3D CAD & BIM

Here unfortunately things are less easy. There is at the moment no ready solution, but there are several efforts going in that direction, so the future is promising. One of these efforts is an application called FreeCAD to which I have the honor to contribute with coding in my spare time. FreeCAD is a full modern parametric modeler, and although very young, it already has a lot of interesting functionality for doing architecture, such as a 2D drawing module, usual 3D tools such as extrusion and booleans, and a 3D-to-2D module. A real BIM module is also in development.



I write a lot about FreeCAD on this blog...

3D MODELING & RENDERING

In the area of 3D rendering, things are not only better but state-of-the-art, thanks to an amazing piece of software called Blender. Blender runs on windows too, so chances are high that you heard about it already. Blender is for me the best general-use 3D application available today. Better than 3DS Max, better than Maya. It is faster, smaller, and made by 3D users instead of made by Autodesk. Blender can do everything that those 2 applications can do, and has several external renderers available.

The only drawback of blender is that it can be hard to learn if you are much used to another 3D application. But I warned you about that already...



In fact, I use Blender so much that it is now not only what I use to do rendering, but also to compose architecture:



I also write a lot about Blender, there are also many tutorials on the homepage of this site.

But there is something I didn't tell you yet. Remember I told Windows applications don't run on Linux, right? Well it's not totally true. There is a little gem of a software, called Wine, which allows to run Windows applications on a Linux system. It won't work with all applications, and many will run with problems. But one of the applications that runs almost perfectly is Sketchup! Installing Windows applications with Wine is nowadays almost as easy as installing them on Windows, and they integrate seamlessly on your desktop (But of course it is never as comfortable and fast as running a native Linux application). The Wine website has a list of windows software that runs with it, with ratings, comments and notes.

2D PAINTING & PHOTO-COMPOSITION

What would be of us architects without photoshop, right? The most famous Linux photoshop-like application is called Gimp, and, although many purists will argue that it lacks some or another indispensable photoshop option, is an excellent and very mature application, totally able to perform all the tasks architects usually require from photoshop, and, thanks to the typical friendliness to extension and customization found in most Linux applications, you can extend it into a very powerful digital painting platform.



To give you an idea, this is the kind of drawing that you can achieve with gimp only:



But a lot of digital artists use Linux nowadays, so there are many more interesting tools available, like MyPaint or Krita. Another must-have Linux application is inkscape, which is a vectorial drawing application, similar to Corel Draw or Illustrator. It is commonly used for drawing diagrams, icons and vector artwork, but is perfect for mounting more complex presentation sheets.



Also worth noting, many of those applications also run on windows, so it's a good place to try.

Are there architects out there who use Linux?

Because of all the little problems but mostly because it is not very well known, very few architects use Linux at this time. But things are changing fast... Here is a list of interesting people who share tips, techniques and resources about the subject:

• Yorik van Havre, yes, that's me. More about architecture on Linux on my homepage...
• Allan Brito, lots of things, mostly about Blender.
• Check also Allan's very interesting Blender 3D architect blog.
• Gabriel Salas, another Linux-addicted architect
• Linux made easy, Engineer Ricardo Perry's blog about Linux and engineering
• Linux Aided Design, a blog about CAD on the Linux platform
• Foro ArqSLA forum about open-source software for architects
• LibreArq.org, a community of architects who use free software

Enjoy!

Draft objects are now usable with PartDesign module

Now Draft objects can be drawn on any existing face. If the working plane was not set manually, the face on which you begin to draw will automatically determinate the working plane. If you draw closed shapes, they can be used for Pads and Pockets too.

Commenting post 28: Cara,

esse projeto eh muito iradoooooooooo!!

Hi Yorik...good evening...I just want to ask your opinion concerning external renderers for Blender, for doing photorealistic ArchViz, which one is better, luxrender or yafaray? Or should I use the blender internal renderer? I have seen your work in Vimeo and they were awesome. I'd love to do something like those in the future.

Commenting post 132: did you try to output (degenerated) triangles for lines ? on (cheap) opengl-cards this is much faster ..

Thanks! I had figured I would need to rework the models somewhat but I'm not very good with Blender yet so I was looking for a place to start. I need to render a lot of trees, but they are tiny on-screen and only viewed from a small range of angles. The billboard tree is along the lines of what I was figuring I'd need.

Commenting post 142: Hi Rob,
I have all that stuff here too, fortunately!
the blender greenhouse (blender trees with textures included): http://yorik.uncreated.net/greenhouse.html
the rendered textures: http://yorik.uncreated.net/archive/textures/index.html
the ngp files + textures used to create them: http://yorik.uncreated.net/archive/ngplants/
the povray plugin I use to render the images directly from ngplant: http://yorik.uncreated.net/scripts/ngplant-povray.html

Feel free to use anything you might find useful. But note that these trees are not exactly suited for games. The 3D versions are way too heavy for games, and the textures are flat renders, made for billboards, which are good for animation but not too good for games. One solution I used already is to use them for vegetation that is far from the camera. Then, using the textures and doing a "cross" with 2, 3 or 4 planes works well, like this:



blend file here...

I realized you have a lot of stuff here, I was talking about the trees in your blender greenhouse.

I am interested in trying to use your trees in a game I'm working on, but the site that hosts the textures seems to be gone. Suggestions?

Commenting post 139: Linux is not really better than windows, just different. I find it better for a lot of reasons, but both system have their strong points. For running graphic software, linux has the advantage of being much more light on the system resources. So if you run a heavyweight application, you can dedicate more resources of you r system to it instead of having it eaten by the operating system. For example, I run a very lightweight debian installation, which occupies about 100Mb of RAM. Compare to windows 7, which occupies about 1.3Gb... When you render a heavy 3D file, it happens often that you need more than 3Gb ram. On a 4Gb system it makes a big difference. A lot of other factors such as maximum use of shared components, etc... also can make applications running on Linux faster.

But it is not a golden rule of course. An application well programmed on windows will surely run much better than something badly done on linux.

Really it should be a matter of preference. Windows is more "well known", has more applications available, while linux can be faster, and is certainly much more fun to tweak and customize. I think you should try, you'll see by yourself... No need to install anything, you can just grab a live iso (such as http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download ), burn it on a cd, then try it without changing anything to your system...

Commenting post 97: Hi:
Im an user of Autocad and Revit, and i would like to know how better can be Linux to run graphic software than Windows?
Best regards from Chile

Sorry my English

FreeCAD Arch module: working on top of sketches

I just made a couple of improvements so walls can be automatically built on top of complex sketches. This way, it is now possible to build your whole floor plan from one sketch, having it completely constrained...

After you build a sketch, just press the Wall button and that's it!

Hand drawings

More hand drawings! Not totally hand drawings actually, since they are based on a basic 3D model...




Project by Adriana Furst.

Hi from Poland Yours blog is GREAT :thumb:

Commenting post 135: good job

House sketch

project by Adriana Furst

Commenting post 132: great stuff!

Commenting post 132: Wow! great work!

The FreeCAD Arch module, development news

I recently made a bit of progress on the Arch module front. Things are still far from efficiently usable, but there are already a couple of easy operations that can be done, and several of the tools have been refined. We now have two basic architecture components (Wall and Structure) and containers (Cell, Floor, Building an Site), plus two tools to simply add or remove components to/from a container. This is temporary, that operation is planned to be done by dragging and dropping directly in the tree view later.

The wall and structure tools are most useful when used with a selected object such as a line or open wire, for a wall, or a closed shape, for a structure. But they can also be invoked without any selected object, in that case the wall is built on a default line that can be edited and extended, and the structure is a simple cubic element. They can also be based not only on a wire, but also on a face or a solid. Of course a face only allows to specify an extrusion heigth (no width and length) and a solid doesn't allow you to teak anything. But in the future when walls will grow more complex and orient how they look in 2D be able to make any solid shape behave like a wall will be very useful.

I also built a temporary system to export 2D data from blender to FreeCAD, while there is no dxf exporter available for blender 2.5x. There is also a new "group layers into compounds" option to the Draft dxf preferences, which, instead of importing every single dxf entity, groups objects from same layers into compounds, which turns the import and 3D view operation blind fast.

Another area where I put some effort recently is in the blender to freecad workflow. There is nothing better in the world to conceive architecture than blender. Think of the flow and easiness of sketchup but with the power of 3ds max. But blender works in meshes, which is at the same time annoying and the key for its success. Meshes are very simple (too simple), but because of that, very flexible and fast.

FreeCAD imports blender meshes very easily. Until now I haven't seen that operation fail once. Just export them as .obj from blender, and import that .obj file in FreeCAD, thats it. Remember that the obj format has the annoying particularity to invert Y and Z axes.

Maíra and me are currently working on a project that is totally developed on blender. This is the project in blender, so you can evaluate the complexity:



And the same project, exported and imported in FreeCAD:



Everything is there, precisely. The file in that state is available here, in case you want to have a look. In spite of the complexity, the 3D display of FreeCAD is totally able to handle that amount of data fluidly. The big hiccup is when you are getting a lot of separate objects in the document, but I'll come to that later.

I also drew a base plan in draftsight (on top of an exported 2D view, with the tools I mentioned earlier. That plan was saved in dxf and imported back in FreeCAD:



I then positioned and rotated that plan to fit perfectly under the mesh model. Since both were extracted from the same model originally, the coincidence is perfect. I did it that way and not the other way round so next time I import the meshes from blender they will fit right into place.



Then come the interesting bits. I first added a tool that splits a mesh into separated components. When you model in blender, it is often more convenient to group several objects into one. For example, here, each building block is one blender object. This allows you, in blender, to keep everything under one local coordinates system. But you must also take care of keeping different part dissociate (use the Y key a lot), this makes it easier, for example to select all pillars inside the buiding. And finally, you must also take care of creatign as little non-manifold pieces as possible. Non-manifolds cannot become solids, which is very important later. Use a lot Ctrl+Shift+Alt+M in Blender to highlight non-manifold edges.

The split tool in FreeCAD also highlights non-manifold components, painting them in red:



Then it's easy to temporarily turn off the non manifold components, and concentrate only on the important parts:



Then there is another tool to convert selected meshes into solids:



This tool is based on a macro that has been on the wiki since a while, based on Werner's mesh-to-part conversion work. The big thing is that it joins coplanar faces, simplifying tremendously the geometry. But I found out it still behaves bad with very complex meshes, made of a lot of small faces. In case the tool cannot build solids, the bad results are also highlighted, and the mesh is not deleted:



But anyway it doesn't make too much sense to have beams and slabs as one big element, so I'll either remodel that part in Blender or directly in FreeCAD. Once we have or solid Part shapes, converting them into walls or structural elements is a simple press of a button (I pained them in yellow here so it's easier to see):



That's about where we are now. Not much you'll say, but turning "raw" mesh data into parametric objects is a very important piece of the game. Next development steps will include complexifying those objects and giving them additional properties, then I'll start experimenting with automatic sectionning, which will probably be the most spectacular achievement. At the end of the jouney, I plan to obtain that kind of output:







The first one is the dxf plan that I imported in FreeCAD above, the 2 others are sections taken from sketchup. They look quite nice, but they are extremely unusable because of the too high complexity. There are so many lines that it is almost impossible to rework, in any application. But sketchup makes sections for rendering, not for reworking, and I have good hopes to achieve much better results inside FreeCAD, since our objects are not meshes anymore but much optimized solids, and getting precise contours, and distinguish what is cut from what is viewed is very easy.

A final note about complexity, the biggest problem at the moment in FreeCAD is that when dealing with high number objects in your document, things get pretty slow. A 2D plan like the one above, when imported line by line, is almost unworkable. But the complete mesh project from the first image shows that the 3D view is perfectly able to handle a very high amount of data, the tremendous difference shown by my little upgrade to the dxf importer and Jürgen's recent work on the View Providers show that the problem is totally solvable. The key, at Arch module level, seems to be in quickly grouping smaller objects into higher-level containers. I'll also have a look at the FreeCAD zoom system, but there are certainly many things to do to solve that issue.

That's it for now, thanks for reading until here!

Blender 2.5 black and yellow theme

A little theme for blender 2.5. Install it via the theme manager addon. Enjoy!



http://yorik.uncreated.net/scripts/themes/blacknyellow.blt

Gowanus canal competition

This is our entry for the Gowanus canal competition.



Give passage

Give access to your roof or your grounds. The central idea is to allow pedestrian circulation on all the intervention area, together with a significant augmentation of green areas. Pedestrians will be able to transit through these parcels, as if it was a big park with different levels.

The parcels in the intervention area continue as private properties of their respective owners, the difference is that they allow pedestrian transit. The urban blocks will only be defined by their bording streets, while pedestrians will be able to cross them in diverse ways. Acces can be permitted in several forms: through gardens or parking lots, through ground floors or through flat roofs.

The owner of an area can choose which alternative to use, providing the whole vertical projection of the parcel as accessable pedestrian way. Areas above roofs will be accessable by stairs, elevators and bridges and will serve as gardens and squares for the surrounding communities. Empty areas on parcels should offer at least 60% green area, the rest covered with interlocked pavement, always accessable to pedestrians.

If you are an owner, you can choose for example to use the ground floor of your building as a commercial area with shops, making it accessable 24h/day, or make a garden.

You can also transform the roof of your buildingin a square, a reading or leisure space. You can bind your roofgarden to another one with a footbridge over the street, so people can cross it without confronting the cars. There are a lot of possible combinations.

The whole objective of this proposal is to offer a bigger public green area without transforming the canal surroundings in a big empty park. Everything continues to function like before, but with more green, less walls, and more walkpath for people.

With the increase of green and permeable area, this project acts as a complement to the sponge park project, and since green roofs help a lot in retaining rainwater, reduces greatly the overload of the sewer system during heavy rains.

Giving free access to community residents through parcels, this projects helps to turn the area more secure and alive, creating a sense of community of an unique quality.

Thank you so much for the quick reply. I tried your advice, but I could not make the right extrusion and bends. It seems the extrusion is being twisted as it follows the path. Maybe I am doing it wrong or there are some missing parameters to satisfy. Nevertheless, the experience on doing it is a little bit difficult, but I did have some fun on doing the exercise. My objective then was to make a gutter for the roof. If you can share me a short video link tutorial concerning the matter it will be a great help. Tnx a lot ....Anthony :-)

Commenting post 116: So much good this article, I will make some tests and I will post the results here. I will use Blender+LibreCAD on Linux and Blender + FreeCAD on Windows. I have all programs installed.

Hi Anthony,
There are several ways to do that in blender, but the most precise would be 1) make a mesh that is your "profile" to be extruded, 2) make a nurbs curve that will be your path (it is not necessarily curved, it can have straight segments), 3) extrude your mesh profile, and if necessary sudivide the extrusion into segments (either by hand with Ctrl+R or via a subsurf modifier) and 4) add a curve modifier to your mesh profile, indicating your curve as its path. You may need to put the origin point of the curve and the mesh at the same location for best results.
Hope this helps, don't hesitate to ask if you need more!
Cheers
Yorik

Yorik, good morning, I am currently working here in Qatar as a draftsman. I am a fan of blender and sketchup. But I am not the guy whose always using them. I tend to just read and read articles and tutorials about these software. I just want to ask a question. How do you perform a command in Blender that is same like SketchUp's Follow Me tool, or the AutoCAD's Extrude along path. I searched a lot concerning this matter but I did not have the luck to find one. Eventually, I've wanted to be a good 3d renderer for ArcViz. Many thanks....Anthony Datu

Ahaaaaa!!! i found it ...................aaaaaaaaaaaaah ( relief ) SOOOOOOOORRY & thanks for everything Man.

Eeeyha!!

Sincerely: Rafael Meza

Ha! sorry it's me again, and nope, i don't know it doesn't appears neither in the tool shelf (T key ) i made a snap shoot of it but unfortunately i can't placed here however, have you ever heard about some kind of Bug about it?

I'm using Windows 7 64bits with an AMD Phenom II Processor...i don't know is kind a frustrating, the worst of it is that i don't know if I'm doing something wrong.

Thanks for read this bothering lines, and of course thanks for share.

Sincerely : Rafael Meza

Thanks Yorik , but I've looking for those options in the tool shelf too and some how they doesn't show up let me download a different build from GA with your plug-in included and see what happens, I'll let you know.

Thanks for your time man.
Sincerely: Rafael Meza

Hi Rafael,
Sorry, I forgot to update the post... The script doesn't open a popup anymore, instead it sits in the toolshelf (T key), which is more the new blender way. I'll update that post now!
Hope it helps!

Commenting post 73: Hi before anyrhing Thanks to share you kwnoldege with all of us, really really thanks.
Ok im pretty new in blender, so when i try to download the addon, the link opens a new tab in mozilla and only apear the script, Its ok i copy the text and then i ran blender open de pyton console press autocomplete, later i went to the addons menu in user preferences & GOOOd i had it ....it works but some how the pop up menu where you said that we can define value of thickness, never appears.
I don't know what i did wrong, or if this addon doesnt run in the newest version of blender 2.58a can you help me out. Sincerely rafael meza

Commenting post 114: Great Job !

Exporting 2d linework from blender 2.5

Blender 2.5X still does not feature the excellent dxf exporter Migius wrote for blender 2.49, so I mounted this little workaround to be able to export linework from a blender model to a 2D CAD application such as FreeCAD or LibreCAD (or AutoCAD if you really must...).

It is made of two scripts, a blender addon to export and a FreeCAD macro to import. In blender, install the addon the usual way, then use it from the export menu to export the selected meshes. What will be exported is simply all the edges of the selected meshes in a text file, one edge (2 vertices) per line.

Then, place the FreeCAD macro in your macros folder, then run it, select the exported .txt file, and voila, your objects edges get imported, one compound object is created per blender object. You can then select everything and export to dxf if you want.

Here are the two scripts:
http://yorik.uncreated.net/scripts/blender25/io_export_flat_edges.py
http://yorik.uncreated.net/scripts/importFlatEdges.FCMacro


The meshes to be exported in blender


The imported linework in FreeCAD


The same linework exported in .dxf fomat and opened in LibreCAD.

@Amerio jeannot, @David Siebert,
Thanks for the kind words
David, I never thought of that, good idea, I'll contact the guys one of these days

A little preview of what we are working on at the moment...

Haiku icons for blender 2.5

These are the standard blender icon files where I changed the folder icons to match the Haiku icon theme. Follow the official instructions to install...

18 new alpha textures

All these and many other are available on the textures page, and the ngplant and texture files are in the ngp repository. Enjoy!

Wine color theme

It's pretty easy to save a color theme for wine. Just locate the corresponding part in your .wine/user.reg, then paste it in a new .reg file, and add "HKEY_CURRENT_USER" to the first line. The final file reads like this:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Control Panel\\Colors] 1309724542
"ActiveBorder"="212 208 200"
"ActiveTitle"="10 36 106"
"AppWorkSpace"="128 128 128"
"Background"="58 110 165"
"ButtonAlternateFace"="181 181 181"
"ButtonDkShadow"="0 0 0"
"ButtonFace"="2 2 2"
"ButtonHilight"="40 40 40"
"ButtonLight"="12 11 10"
"ButtonShadow"="0 0 0"
"ButtonText"="128 128 128"
"GradientActiveTitle"="166 202 240"
"GradientInactiveTitle"="192 192 192"
"GrayText"="128 128 128"
"Hilight"="255 128 0"
"HilightText"="0 0 0"
"HotTrackingColor"="0 0 128"
"InactiveBorder"="212 208 200"
"InactiveTitle"="128 128 128"
"InactiveTitleText"="212 208 200"
"InfoText"="0 0 0"
"InfoWindow"="255 255 225"
"Menu"="2 2 2"
"MenuBar"="212 208 200"
"MenuHilight"="255 128 0"
"MenuText"="192 192 192"
"Scrollbar"="212 208 200"
"TitleText"="255 255 255"
"Window"="28 28 28"
"WindowFrame"="0 0 0"
"WindowText"="255 255 255"

Then you can apply it with: regedit myfile.reg"

Linux steam launcher

You can then launch steam alone with "steam", or directly launch a game with "steam 2770" (being the game number you find in the desktop link that steam creates when installing a game).

cd /home/yorik/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Steam
if [ "$#" -gt 0 ]; then
    wine Steam -applaunch "$@"
else
    wine Steam
fi

Commenting post 87: wow!!! im fond of 3d modelling and i'm training myself with blender. But i've nerver seen so beautiful work!!! So Great!

Commenting post 105: I was wondering if you have contacted FLOSS weekly about your project. They are a pretty popular podcast and could bring some big PR to you guys. Contact merlyn@stonehenge.com if you are interested. I have downloaded FreeCad and can hardly wait to try it out.

Commenting post 106: Hi Gudeta!

Good point, I added inkscape, thanks for reminding!

About developers being paid, I think this is a very long discussion... Basically everyone should be free to do what he wants, I want to work "for free" on FreeCAD because I want the software, and I don't want someone to "own" it and decide for me what I need and what I don't need. This has in theory nothing to do with being paid or not. For example if someone wants to pay me a couple of programming hours to add such or such feature, why not?

I think the whole issue is there, if you can do some good work that someone is willing to pay you to do, you shouldn't bother about if it is free software or not, you will earn money. It is your skills that give you money, not your job. The fact that free software costs nothing is actually more a side-effect. Note that there is also software that costs nothing but is not free (many CAD clones for example), and free software that give money (I think of the humble bundles games for example, where they earned a lot of money and ended up releasing many games as open source). It is a very complex world

About FreeCAD being like Revit, unfortunately, at the current rythm, it'll take a long, long time...

Commenting post 97: @Linux for architects

Hi Yorik !
As always your page is a nice resource,This is a nice article for Linux newbie archs. For sure it will help a lot,
Personally I like Linux and its apps, Free is cool for the user but what about for the developers, don't you think someone should pay if he uses a software and affords to buy it. . . i just wanted to hear your idea,

----- You missed Inkscape!! ----
btw: How much time do you think it would take for FreeCad to be like Revit,

Thanks for your time and keep up !

51

This is a project we recently made with Sander and Angelica for the factory of cachaça 51, the largest and probably the most famous cachaça manufacturer worldwide. They are currently spread over several buildings in town and wanted a new building that would gather all administrative functions in one place, close to the main factory facilicy.

The main idea is to create a dialog with the existing reservoirs on the factory site. Those reservoirs contain the different ingredients used to make cachaça and other byproducts. They are a very important mark in the landscape, and have even become a touristic attraction in the city.

We also proposed a building that is symbolically strongly bound to the 51 brand. The number 51 appears everywhere in the project. The building is made of 6 blocks of 3 floors, connected by bridges inside a central atrium. The construction system is simple, the "cubes" can be made with a wide range of techniques, from steelframe to classical concrete structure, and the atrium has very small spans.

The central atrium connects everything in the building, and is the main space that visitors discover when they enter the facility. It has an interior garden, a "street bar", a museum, and all the bridges used to transit from a block to another. The functions inside the building are spread from the most public, right next to the entrance, to the most private, up the third floor.

On the terrain, behind the building, are also a new parking lot and a garden, and a pedestrian path that connects the administrative building to the factory.

























The .blend file is available here.

Conky setups

These are 3 conky setups I use frequently. All of them make use of two little apps I wrote called fluxtwitter and fluxweather, to get weather and twitter timeline, and gcalcli to access google calendar. The on-desktop terminal is tilda.


conky-yell - based on another one I found on the net, I can't remember where... I liked the big design date, and added a couple of more info...


conky-orange - this one s based on the famous ubuntu conky orange theme, which you will need for this one to run (at least the lua file, responsible for drawing the gauges).


conky-oneliner - a one-line conky setup, also adapted from another one I found on the net.

Commenting post 102: I thought you would like

Commenting post 97: Thanks for call me linux-addicted. Actually enjoy it more each day using GNU / Linux. You wrote a very comprehensive article Congratulations!

Commenting post 97: Amazing article, really helpful

3 new plant alpha textures

This time I made a banana tree! Take them on the textures page.

Commenting post 98: Gracias Rafael... Adicioné esos links al artigo!

Commenting post 97: I recommend to visit
foroarqsl.creatuforo.com/ Software Open source for architects
librearq.org/ community of architects who likes FLOSS

Commenting post 95: Hi,
Actually this script is still not too good... If you look on the http://projects.blender.org tracker, there is a discussion going on, it looks like the original 2.49 script was able to do so.

Commenting post 73: Just found your blog. Thanks for this. It still works in 2.57. Is there an easy hack to make this draw cylinders instead of cubes? Thanks again.

Refreshing the Sketchup window on Linux

Sketchup has the annoying particularity to not refresh its window correctly when you run it on linux + wine. This little trick uses the xrefresh utility to refresh a pixel at the center of your screen, forcing the sketchup window to redraw. Put the following code in an executable script:

urxvt -e watch -n 0.3 xrefresh -geometry 1x1+500+500 &
watchPID=$!
cd /home/yorik/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Google/Google SketchUp 8
wine ./SketchUp
kill $watchPID

Retrieved from http://credentiality2.blogspot.com/2010/04/ubuntu-linux-sketchup-using-wine.html

thanks for plants...

blenderhand drawings

These 2 drawings were made on top of a very quick & simple rendering. I think I prefer the "distorted" aspect of hand-made perspective, over perfect conputer-generated perspectives like this one, but having all your main color layers already separated for you by blender (walls, glass, vegetation, roof, backgound and edges) instead of having to fillpaint everything by hand makes you earn several hours. And it's quite refreshing to see your own drawings look different...





Project by Adriana Furst.

Hi mahdiar,
No there isn't any at the moment. Someone already worked on it but I still hadn't time to have a look... I'll try to do that ASAP.
Cheers
Yorik

hi ! Is there any "cross section " script for blender 2.5 ? If not PLZ create it . It's very very useful . thanks a lot .

Trilha: Mato Grosso - Arapiranga - 11km

Ver esta trilha no Google maps

Comprimento: 11km
Dificuldade: Fácil

Esta trilha é muito bonito e passe por todo tipo de paisagem. Parte da vila de Mato Grosso, perto de Rio de Contas, BA, qui fica bem alto já na serra. Percorre as plantações de café em volta de Mato Grosso, depois bifurca, atravessa vários morros da chapada diamantina, por fim chega numa vista espetacular do vale de Arapiranga. Ali se pode ou dar meia-volta e voltar para Mato Grosso ou descer o morro até Arapiranga.

Nesta trilha você cruza diversos tipos de plantações, sobretudo café, vários riachos, vegetação típica da chapada, e se não descer até Arapiranga, a trilha tem pouco declive. Perfeita para iniciantes!

Trilha: Pico das Almas - 11km

Ver esta trilha no Google maps

Comprimento: 11km
Dificuldade: Média (considere difícil se for sua primeira trilha)

Esta trilha é situada perto de Rio de Contas, BA. Parte de um vilarejo e sobe até o Pico das Almas, alto de quase 2000m. É uma das mais bonitas que já fiz no Brasil. A caminhada é fantástica, segue riachos a maior parte do tempo, passando por vários tipos de alpagens e configurações rochosas, com uma variedade de vegetação simplesmente incrível. Os últimos 400m são uma parede rochosa bastante ingreme, que não é absurdamente difícil de subir (não precisa de equipamento nenhum) mas bastante assustadora para novatos.

Partindo do vilarejo (tem como partir de mais perto do pico, mas vai perder algumas cachoeiras), a trilha dura um dia inteiro, 3 a 4h para subir, e umas 2 a 3h para descer. Nesse vilarejo só se chega de carro infelizmente.

Em principio não precisa de guia para fazer esta trilha, mas você corre o risco de errar de pico Na verdade recomendo ir com um guia se você não for um trekker profissional (se for, existem pontos de GPS para esta trilha em vários lugares da internet)

Haiku2011 desktop theme

Download it from http://yorikvanhavre.deviantart.com/#/d3gc0l2

Manaus

See the whole album here

A couple of tips if you are going to Manaus:

• Eat the local fishes (pirarucu, tambaqui, tucunaré, matrinxã, jaraqui), tipically served with tucupi
• Go see an opera in the Amazonas theatre
• Eat xis caboclinho (bread with cheese, banana and tucumã) at breakfast
• Enter the rainforest at the botanical garden
• Go to the museu do Seringal by taking the river bus (a boat) from the David marina at Ponta Negra
• Take a river bath. Other boats at the same marina will get you to all the beaches around Manaus
• See the encontro das águas

Handheld version

This site now has a special display mode when viewed with a handheld device. It is pretty simple to achieve, it is all made with CSS and works the same way as for printing: You just define new rules inside a "@media handheld { }" declaration. Your handheld browser will do the rest. The best way is to define a set of classes for your "main" screen mode, then overclass some of them inside the handheld (and print) section(s), like this for example:

.myDiv {
    background: black;
    color: white;
    width: 800px;
    }
@media handheld {
    .myDiv {
        width: auto;
        }
    }

The myDiv class will appear white on black in both cases, but on normal screen it will have a width of 800 pixels while on handhelds it will have an automatic width.

Event space

A couple of hand drawings of an event project... Time to try some manga style!

a House for Grégoire and Lívia

A couple of preliminary ideas for the house of Grégoire and Lívia. The whole argumentation can be read in this pdf document (in portuguese).

The base idea is to separate the house into simple components, so different techniques can be used for each of them, turning the house completely material-independent. This way several bioconstruction options can be studied and used, depending on the local availability, without compromising the whole project.

The project also tries to achieve adequate bioclimatic behaviour and provide the best possible natural airflow, and tends to offer, inside a very simple space, a complex array of uses and grouping, by playing with lots of different levels and blurring the interior/exterior relationships.

Hi there, I have just found your site and had a quick look around. I can see that I will be spending a lot more time here, there is so much to look at and some really great tutorials.

Thank you for all the fantastic work

Yorik, thank you very much for creating these models. I'm going to use a few of the trees in a demo game for my Nightshade game engine (www.nightshadegames.com). Thanks!

Commenting post 77: Cool! Will try this. :-D

Tchernobyl? Fukushima? No! São Paulo, right now...

Playing with luxrender

I never paid enough attention to LuxRender, so the other day I decided to play a little bit with it. Installation on linux (debian wheezy 64bits) with blender 2.57 is easy (download the luxrender 64bit binaries, download the blender addon, copy pylux.so from the binaries to the addon, activate it and that's it). This is luxrender 0.8, so it already has (preliminary) support for GPU rendering, and the addon is really impressive already, totally integrated into the different panels of blender (scene, materials, lights, world, etc...).

The only thing I couldn't make work is rendering transparently in blender, that is, without opening any luxrender window. This is due to the luxrender binary I downloaded being compiled with a different libpng version than mine. I could of course compile luxrender, but there are some problems with the version of openCL libs I have in debian (of course lux needs the most advanced available...) and I got too lazy to look for a solution.

Anyway, rendering without opening the luxrender interface makes you miss a great feature, which is the ability to tweak your image whil it is rendering...

This is the image I managed to produce (2h rendering):



The light setup is dead simple, place one sunlamp, orient it the way you want, that's it. No setting, no tweaking. The geometry has nothing particular, lux respects all modifiers, the geometry is rendered just exactly like blender.

The materials is of course the main focus when you work with another renderer. But with this latest addon, things are really not too complicated. The blender materials panels get changed by luxrender, and you have many cryptic options to look at, but the system is simple: Choose one of the presets, change the color, change the texture and that's it. Special materials such as glass also have further presets to choose from. Textures can be either normal blender textures, or special lux textures (set from the same textures panel) which have many further options. One detail, though, all objects must be UV-mapped. And you can only add one diffuse texture.

In the image above, sand and concrete are common "matte" materials with a normal blender texture. Inox is a standard lux "glossy metal" material, the wood is a "glossy" material with a blender texture, and the character is a vertical plane with an alpha texture. This one has to be set as lux texture in order to take alpha channel intoo account. Finally I added a little bit of bloom in luxrender while rendering the image.

It really doesn't take long to get used to how luxrender works. To newcomers to luxrender, I would suggest first to test light setup, without putting any material. If the light comes good, then go ahead, put materials. Another important thing, you can take a normal blender file, already set up with blender materials, add a new scene linking objects, and start tweaking luxrender settings and materials in that new scene, your original blender materials will remain the same in your original scene (luxrender only "adds" information to the materials, does not modify them). And there is now a button called "convert blender material" which automatically creates a lux material based on the original one. But I found it better to do it by hand, because the result is not always like you want. Anyway, outside the fact that you must UVmap everything, you can get on tracks pretty fast.

Collada support in FreeCAD

I just found this interesting piece of software called pycollada and used it to make FreeCAD able to import collada files. The support is very basic, only simple geometry is imported. No materials, no components or whatsoever. But it is already pretty handy for a serie of uses. The image below shows an imported collada file generated by the BIMserver (as a little appetizer, waiting for true IFC support)...

Commenting post 73: Wow, obrigado! Eu costumava usar bastante esse script no 2.4, e no 2.5 eu comecei a duplicar os objetos, apagar as faces deixando somente as arestas para converter a mesh para curvas e por fim dar a espessura.
Estava até pensando em escrever um tuto sobre isso, agora quero testar seu script!

Solidify-wireframe script for blender 2.5

Another port I made for the 2.56 version of blender, of a script originally written for 2.4 by Alejandro Sierra. Download it from here (you might need to right-click->save as):

http://yorik.uncreated.net/scripts/blender25/mesh_solidify_wireframe.py

The script is very simpe to use, once installed via the user preferences->addons page, when you are editing a mesh, press Mesh->Edges->Solidify Wireframe, and the selected edges of your mesh will become solidified with quadrangular sections. A dialog will pop up to allow you to choose the section width. Enjoy!




Edit: In latest version, this script doesn't open a popup anymore, instead it sits in the toolshelf (T key), more the new blender way.

The joy of blender scripting...

Isn't this comfortable?

FreeCAD t-shirts

I made this design for a FreeCAD t-shirt. If you want yours too, follow the instructions! (No money goes to the FreeCAD project, so do it only for the fun, not to help the project!)

Commenting post 69: Hi Diogo,
Saw and responded there

Commenting post 42: Hi yorik,

So I'm passing here because I saw your little project and I'd like to help you out as this is of my interest. Since I know that phpbb can let we miss some forum posts, I have posted a little (long) post with some ideas about Arch Module at the discussion (at sourceforge.net) you talk about at this post. Tell me later if I can help out the project.

more hand drawings

Those are not totally hand-drawings anymore, since I am recently very inspired by David Revoy's work, I decided to try painting over a simple 3D render. For these images I also developed an exr import plugin so I could import a blender render easily into the gimp with all its render layers already separated into gimp layers.





Project by Adriana Furst.

Gimp Multilayer EXR import plugin

This plugin imports multilayer EXR images into GIMP. Please note that layers contained in the EXR image will be converted to tga format and therefore reduced to 8bit/channel. So, don't use this plugin if you want to import high-range (HDR) images into the gimp, but simply for importing multi-layer images such as exported by blender.

For this plugin to work, you also need the djv tools (djv-info and djv-convert) installed and correctly running on your system. See http://djv.sourceforge.net for info & download. To install the plugin, simply copy the file-exr.py file into your gimp plugins folder. It is tested on linux but should work on any platform.

The workflow you can achieve with this plugin is the following: When rendering an image in blender, you can divide the render into several render layers, specifying for example to render each blender layer in a different render layer. You then specify "multilayer" as the image format.



Then, after saving the image as an .exr file, just open it in gimp (gimp will now recognize the format) and all the layers will be imported as separated layers, for your painting convenience... Enjoy!


Example of the results here...

DraftSight launcher for linux 64bits systems

I modified a bit the DraftSight launcher so it behaves correctly on a 64bit system and adopts your current gtk theme. You must of course take care of having the correct gtk engines in /usr/lib32 (usually by simply installing ia32-libs-gtk).

#!/bin/sh
BINDIR="/opt/dassault-systemes/draftsight/bin"
BASENAME="DraftSight"
export GTK_PATH=/usr/lib32/gtk-2.0/
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:"$BINDIR:$BINDIR/../lib"
export QT_PLUGIN_PATH="$BINDIR:$BINDIR/../plugins"
if [ -d /usr/lib32/gconv ]; then
  export GCONV_PATH=/usr/lib32/gconv
fi
BINARY=$BINDIR/"$BASENAME.bin"
cd "$BINDIR"
if [ "$#" -gt 0 ]; then
    "$BINARY" -style gtk "$@"
else
    "$BINARY" -style gtk
fi

Commenting post 64: Yeah ! Good job !

More FreeCAD dxf export options...

I did some more work on the dxf exporter, now it begins to behave pretty accurately. You can now set an option in the preferences screen, in order to export 3D objects to polyface meshes. This is not the ideal way to export FreeCAD 3D objects, because they will be turned into meshes, so you'll loose important data such as curved surfaces and solid behaviour, but it is the only way to put 3D into a dxf file available to us as long as the ACIS format is kept closed and undocumented.

The other fix I did is to make the way to export 2D Drawing pages to dxf format work better. We now have fairly precise results when exporting such pages. The only thing you need to do is to select a page object, hit File->Export and specify a .dxf filename. There are still some glitches, some objects don't get drawn at the correct scale, etc... But the result is usable already. Below is an example of what you can expect to obtain:



The objects in the FreeCAD viewport



The same objects placed on a Drawing sheet



The sheet exported as dxf and opened in LibreCAD

Meanwhile, we've been doing some background work on a really big project...

Half-a-day work on a shopping mall

These images (project by HVC Arquitetura were made in half-a-day, on top of a sketchup model of the building. All the "sauce" was added directly in blender. I also tried some normal mapping on the google earth imagery, but it is a very weak paliative to the lack of real environment modeling...

2 hand drawings fo an "Interior Mineiro"-style house

I begin to lightpaint everything with gradients now... Project by Adriana Furst

Commenting post 184: Background Images in FreeCAD

This feature is priceless for getting an item for reverse-engineering into CAD; I often begin with industrial art images from a century or more ago (often no modern 'blueprint' ever existed).

If an object of known (real world) dimensions is portrayed in the image, by use of a CAD reference line spanning the known dimension (initially this reference line will be proportional to the size of the image as imported), the entire image can be scaled to real world dimensions (or very nearly); this is quite advantageous as a starting point for reverse-engineering. It can allow one to reproduce the object in whole or in part, modify features, and also to design new parts to interact with the original assembly. Other significant design information becomes easier to approximate as well.

Well Done Yorick !!

Commenting post 58: Hm good tip, thanks! Although this plugin won't treat hidden/shown lines, it is pretty useful too...

Commenting post 57: In sketchup, for exporting grouped flat surfaces directly to SVG, you can use Flattery Papercraft plugin. The scale remains correct.

Generating vector 2D views of 3D models

The other day I found this interesting little trick with my friend Omar to get a precise vector 2D elevation view of a 3D model in blender. It implies a bit of swap work between applications but the result is just perfect.

1. Export your blender model as .3ds



2. Import that 3ds model in sketchup. Be sure to mark "merge coplanar faces" in the import options.

3. Set yourself in front view, set the camera to "parallel projection" and print your view as a pdf file (on linux you must have the cups-pdf package installed for wine applications to see the pdf printer). Be sure to mark "Use high accuracy HLR" otherwise your pdf will contain bitmaps instead of vectors



4. Open the resulted pdf file in inkscape (on linux you need the uniconvertor package for inkscape to be able to open pdf files), explode if needed (and remove filled areas if you wish, will make it load faster in blender afterwards) and save it as a svg file



5. Open the svg file in blender, now you just need to scale it to the exact size of your model...

No doubt your work is very good ... what can be done with Blender and it is also rounded out with the phrase "100% made ​​in Blender. " Good advantage for the free software architecture.

Many things are similar, few are not so much and how menus and dialog boxes, but we can adapt. Although not free software is a good opportunity for disadvantaged people and as you say, "could be just what we need to fill the gap. "
Thanks Yorik

Mentioned on SockRoll Architecture feed!

Commenting post 51: Sure thing! There are actually an awful lot of other apps that could be linked to freecad. Other countries also have their own energy-analysis software, there are structural analysis apps, accoustic-analysis apps, etc, etc.
That might take some time, but the more things go, the more people help with development, so...

Lots of works ahead anyway!

Commenting post 42: What about doing this, and define all the wall stuff.... and finally an export to ENERGY Plus??? something like openstudio... or to integrate openstudio (sourceforge) in freecad???

Hi Cesar,
I just installed the fresh new version of DraftSight on linux... Very cool! Almost identical to Ares, its "father". Next 2D CAD work I have to do, I'll try to do it with it, to see how it behaves in production...
Of course even if they license it for free, it doesn't mean it doesnt stay a commercial product, but who knows, it might become just what we need to fill the gap.

Hi Yorik

What is your opinion of the CAD DraftSight?

I just installed and I was surprised by how nice it is, by its small size, but also by their license and free word game vs. freedom.

A greeting and thanks for what you give us

Cesar M. Ugalde

A sketch for the cgtalk daily sketch! It's a view from my window, showing Augusta Street, heart of São Paulo's nightlife...

Hi Jim,
Sure! Help yourself with anything you may find useful from the site. If you need something specific that isn't there (larger images, etc...) just ask me. I'd be very interested to see what you'll be presenting, if you happen to make a slideshow or something, I'd be super grateful if I could have a peek afterwards...
Good luck!
Yorik

Hi Yorik,

I found your blog posts on open source software for design to be very informative. I will be making a presentation on open source software for urban planners, and I would like to include some of your work, specifically what is shown on your "urban design with Blender" page. As I am not a designer myself, I can't create anything that shows Blender's abilities in the short timeframe that I have. All I would like to do is take a few minutes to point out to my fellow planners that (1) there are alternatives to commercial design software like SketchUp Pro and (2) people are using them to do good work. To include your work in my presentation, I will need your permission. May I?

Jim

Towards an Architecture module in FreeCAD

I began to start on an architecture module for FreeCAD. I saw a lot of extatic tweets about the subject these last days, so I thought everybody would like a little explanation, even if things are still very bare. So far I have an IFC parser (adapted from the work of Marijn van Aerle working, that is now able to parse all my test files without errors. Then there is a second part of the importer which is responsible for creating the corresponding objects in FreeCAD. So far that part is only able to grow simple walls, mainly because that's the only "architectural" object already implemented.

We have had a couple of interesting discussions about how to implement other concepts, and things are beginning to come. We now have a pretty functional wall, that can be based on a line or a wire (a polyline, in OCC jargon), a face or even a solid. It can receive appendices (that get joined to it) and holes (that get subtracted to it), although there is still no UI controls for all that.

There is also a floor object, which at the moment is only a container for walls (or other floors), with the particularity that it can join walls that intersect. In the future of course it'll have other attributions such as cutting plan views, etc).



There were also some talks and discussions about the BIM concepts, etc... But being more a practical person, I prefer experimenting and playing with FreeCAD objects gradually than laying out a big plan conceptual ahead.

For now that's it! More to come...

The nodes setup used for the interior scenes of the video below. I took the idea of colouring with a ramp from a recent artwork video from overgrowth...



To compare with, here is how this image was before applying the composite:

One more shopping mall animation

We just finished this one, all made in blender. The interior lighting this time was made only with ambient occlusion. No lights at all, except a sunlight to show the sun rays through the windows. Then, this nodes setup was applied to enhance the colouring. The architecture project is by HVC Arquitetura. Enjoy!



Still images available below...

And here are a couple of still images extracted from the above animation...

Sections coming soon...

Small utility to join alpha and diffuse images

The other day we bought a "people" texture pack from pro-viz. Great resource, I liked much their cool, contemporary, world-citizen people. Fits in almost any project in the world. The only small problem, the texture come in 2 separate image sets, one for diffuse and one for alpha. This is pretty common among alpha texture packs you can find on the net.

So I built up this little utility which scans a folder for alpha and diffuse subfolders, and joins both corresponding images into one .png image. It works on linux, probably out of the box on mac too (imagemagick must be installed), and supposedly on windows too if imagemagick's "convert" utility is in the search path.

#!/usr/bin/python

import sys, os

args = sys.argv[1:]
if len(args) == 2:
    diffusedir = args[0]
    alphadir = args[1]
elif len(args) == 0:
    diffusedir = 'Diffuse'
    alphadir = 'Alpha'
else:
    diffusedir = alphadir = None
    print '''                                                                              
        joinalpha [Diffuse Folder] [Alpha Folder] - joins alpha and diffuse images         
        If no folder is specified, defaults are "Alpha" and "Diffuse"                      
        '''

if diffusedir and alphadir:
    diffusedir = os.getcwd() + os.sep + diffusedir
    alphadir = os.getcwd() + os.sep + alphadir
    if os.path.exists(diffusedir) and os.path.exists(alphadir):
        alphanames = os.listdir(alphadir)
        diffusenames = os.listdir(diffusedir)
        if len(alphanames) == len(diffusenames):
             print 'joining ' + str(len(alphanames)) + ' files...'
             for i in range(len(alphanames)):
                f1 = diffusedir + os.sep + diffusenames[i]
                f2 = alphadir + os.sep + alphanames[i]
                fn = str(i+1).zfill(4) + '.png'
                options = '-colorspace RGB -alpha Off -compose copy_opacity -composite'
                execute = 'convert "' + f1 + '" "' + f2 + '" ' + options + ' "' + fn + '"'
                print 'creating ' + fn
                os.system(execute)
       else:
            print "Alpha and Diffuse folder have a different number of files"
            print alphanames, len(alphanames), diffusenames, len(diffusenames)
    else:
        print "Couldn't find Alpha or Diffuse folders:",alphadir,diffusedir
else:
    print "No Alpha and Diffuse directories specified, or no 'Alpha' and 'Diffuse' direcories in current folder"

New design for my blog!

It was great time to have some change here, so here goes the new 2011 theme. I'm still ironing some little twitches, but that's more or less it. I used quite a lot of CSS3 features (transparency, embedded fonts, etc...) so it might look different or wrong if you use a bad browser (that is, a browser which is not firefox, chrome or opera )
Hopy you'll like!

The 2010 theme, for the posterity!

Hey! Nice website. I googled "inkscape architecture" and I came here. I was looking for people that have had experience with Inkscape in architectural projects. I'm a first year architecture student at Arkitekturskolan in Stockholm and I've used Inkscape for most of my PDF-creations and designs. I just hate Illustrator hahaha

It was cool to visit your website! I like your style c YA.

Commenting post 32: They are really nice Yorik
The first one (with the terrain) is particularly beautiful.

Execution project of a dispensary

Meanwhile, we've been doing the execution project of this small health facility in Brazil...

Floor plan renderings

A couple of rendered floor plans for an older project we've been doing images for... Usually those plans are rendered with an orthographic camera, but here the client asked specifically for the perspective effect, and we found it so nice that we applied it to the site view too...

Searching for the villain

Contrarily to my first idea, I'm more and more thinking the villain must have a fat GI look, not an "alternative", thin look, so it can be drawn in a more Bilal style...

Hi Yorik

I added the 3D model of the indaiatuba open mall on my 3D Architecture webpage so that you can navigate through it in 3D on a web page. I used the original 3D model you posted with the textures from the indaiatubafull.blend file. The original blend file was ten times smaller than the one you posted the other day, so it was easier to work with. Here is the link

tinyurl (dot) com/3DArchitecture

Check integrity script renamed to Select non-manifold edges

I thought this would be clearer and bette rinserted. The script can be found here:

http://yorik.uncreated.net/scripts/blender25/mesh_select_nonmanifold_edges.py

It is found in the Mesh menu in Edit mode, inside the Edges submenu. Simply run the script, and non-manifold edges, if any, will be selected, so you can easily find and fix them. Basically this script's main use if to see if a mesh can be converted to a solid when imported in a program able to do so.

The script's wiki page is at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php?title=Extensions:2.5/Py/Scripts/Modeling/Select_nonmanifold_edges

Note: I just discovered that blender already features a built-in command to do that: Ctrl + Alt + Shift + m, which makes this script totally obosolete now!

Characters study... Nothing right yet, though

Hi John,
Sorry, I forgot about that file. I'm uploading it right now at http://www.uncreated.net/files/indaiatuba.full.blend (89Mb). You'll have to do some cleaning... I have another bigger one on 4shared, but 4shared is in maintenance right now, I'll put the link later.

Your examples are quite cool... Any chance of having baked shadows? It would be nice, but I'm not sure if that doesn't represent quite some work...

Hi Yorik

Did you ever get the chance to put the textures into the indaiatuba.blend file. If you have the original directory structure for this project then it might be as simple as opening the indaiatuba file in blender and issuing the command File -> External Data -> pack into .blend file and then saving the file. I have some other examples of simple blender architecture projects that have been converted to X3D to view in a webpage at this site.

tinyurl (dot) com/3DArchitecture

Some of these examples were taken from the blender guru architecture tutorials from blenderguru (dot) com.


Thanks

John

Orange storyboard

This is more or less the storyboard of the story. There are 10 scenes, outside titles and probably something after the final title which I still don't know, an explosion or something. The characters are still not well defined, but surely enough the group of aliens will be of all different races, and probably have a kind of children's animated movie look. The villain I'm still not sure, but I'll try to find something better than the typical GI look he has here. I'll also need to design better spaceships, but I liked that they look like eggs so full of bombs they're about to explode...

Commenting post 22: @Helder - Obrigado! Foi 100% gimp.

Commenting post 123: Excelente e original. Alias, é a primeira vez que vejo algo de semelhante como proposta. O desenho esta também muito bom. Que programa utilizaste, Inkscape ou Gimp?

In 2.5 indeed. I know it's a little risky since the API isn't stable but I figure they have it mostly worked out. I'm using 2.55 but I'll jump to 2.56 once I get this script done (mostly out of laziness and not wanting to copy/move folders). send me an email

moorep 'at' bu 'dot' edu

and I will send you what I have. I'm not sure why I wanted to split objects, but it seemed important at the time. Really it's more of an exercise to get me moderately familiar with scripting and python for blender. The cross sections I actually need. I use Blender for 3d dental stuff.

@John: I work almost only with blender, but there are not too many architects who do. Propagating blender among architects is difficult, most are already pretty much used to their day-to-day software and wouldn't change easily. About releasing a version of indaiatuba with textures, sure, I'll do that as soon as I have a minute.

@Patrick: Great! I'd be curious to see! Would you happen to rewrite it for blender 2.5x? That would be awesome. Of course I can help you to polish it. Indeed 3D-space transformations can give some headache. What do you want to split the object for, btw? About credits, usually what I do when I work on something someone else made, is simply to add my name to the list of authors inside the script... But you can also set yourself as author and write something like "based on the work of XXXX"... Note that other people already worked on that script besides me. On the blender wiki that script also has a page, where you can add stuff.

Hi Yorik,

I've been messing around in Blender and I've started to rewrite your cross section script. I've got it working and I'm also making it split the object in half. I was wondering two things
1. What is the appropriate way to credit your work since mine is based off of it
2. I'm having a little trouble with my transformations (world -> local). I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the last bit of it. Would you be willing to help me adjust the script after I get it mostly cleaned up? It is probably 85% working at the moment.

All the best,
Patrick

Hi Yorik

Thanks for your feedback, I didn't realize that architects work in 3D in a totally different way. You mention that architects use high level software such as Revit and Archicad for modelling 3D, do you yourself use these software tools or do you like to work with Blender. How popular do you think Blender is in the architecture community. You have sites such as w w w . B l e n d e r 3 d a r c h i t e c t . c o m providing information dedicated to Blender and 3D Architecture visualization. Do you know if many architects are using blender for their design work or is it just a small group of users in the architecture community?

I tried to Export to X3D from Blender one of your architecture blend files that you provide on your website to see what it would look like in an X3D player. However, the textures were missing so I wasn't able to see a proper result. I was wondering if you could pack the textures into the blend file indaiatuba.blend from your Open Mall Shopping project . I think the command in Blender is File -> External Data -> pack into .blend file . Would you be able to do this and provide a link to the updated indaiatuba.blend file . I am currently working with Blender version 2.56a Beta and have reported a number of bugs related to Export to X3D which the Blender developers have recently fixed. I would like to identify and report any bugs I can find in large blender project files like this one.

Thanks in advance

John

Hi John,

I think it pretty complicated. This is, as you say, a subject that comes and goes, there are several techniques out there but nothing really significant, architect are interested but not much, etc. I myself tried to do that several times, with different techniques, with more or less success, but always with a lot of work.

Basically I think there is one, big problem: The way to work in 3D (model and texture) to obtain a good result on the web is similar to working with games, and is totally different from the way architects work in 3D. Architects use to build 3D with specific software such as Revit, Archicad (or in the best cases Sketchup), which are high-level software, made to produce accurate 3D models, at the costs of efficiency. Those software usually use other types of geometry (CSG, BRep, etc). When you need to put your models on the web, there is only one geometry type: Mesh (all 3D web formats such as papervision, o3d, x3d or blender) use meshes. When you try to "downgrade" your high-level model to a mesh with few faces enough to be fast on the web, you get a hell of a time converting, cleaning and reducing complexity by hand. Also architects almost never use UV mapping, because most "real-life" materials use some kind of procedural repetition, so that is another task that must be done manually when converting.

And don't forget that architects usually want badly some features that are still hard to find in web 3D, such as exact sun position and shadows. You need to estimate those by using things like shadow baking in textures, but that's another extra work.

So to resume, the big difficulty would be to find an efficient and not-too-manual way to convert solid-based architecture models into clean, low-poly, uv-mapped mesh models. If you find a way to do that, then you might change the whole picture...

Hi Yorik

I am a new Blender user and visited your site while searching for Blender and Architecture keywords. I was wondering if I could get your opinion on Architecture design with Blender and 3D web technologies. I would like to get your opinion on whether you think architects would find it useful to put their architectural designs in 3D on a web page for visitors to navigate through. Is this something that is already being done in the industry, and if so, do you know what kind of software tools that are being used for this purpose.

Do you think that architects are only looking for high quality rendered images and walk throught video animations of their work or would they go for something like real time computer graphics rendering in a web page. What do you think architects might use 3D in a web page for?

Blender 2.56a has a built in Export to X3D functionality for converting blender 3D models in X3D models for the web. X3D is the ISO industry standard for 3D on the web. Have you ever tried using functionality like this to put Architecture designs in 3D on a web page.

I was told by an architect in France that the 3D web is a hot topic among architects but it is a real mess. I would like to get your thoughts on architecture and the 3D web. Do you think that it is a good idea? Do you think that it is something that architects definitely want, something they would like to have or something that they don't really need? Any feedback you can provide on the subject would be much appreciated.

Thank You

John

pdf to jpg to jpg manipulations

Just a reminder for myself actually. This is a couple of handy commands that use imagemagick for converting to/from a batch of jpg images into a pdf file. This is also a good way to change the resolution of a pdf file containing only images.

convert -scale 1200x1600 myFile.pdf image%d.jpg
convert image*.jpg newFile.pdf

Setting shortcuts for Properties window in Blender 2.5x

I had to fiddle a bit to find those, but it's actually easy: You must:

1) create a new shortcut in User Preferences -> Input -> Property Editor
2) set a F5 shortcut with action "wm.context_set_enum"
3) set a "space_data.context" attribute with valeu "MATERIAL"

You can set shortcuts for the following contexts: 'SCENE', 'RENDER', 'WORLD', 'OBJECT', 'CONSTRAINT', 'MODIFIER', 'DATA', 'BONE', 'BONE_CONSTRAINT', 'MATERIAL', 'TEXTURE', 'PARTICLE' and 'PHYSICS'

Trilha : Rio de Contas - Arapiranga - 17km

Comprimento: 17km
Dificuladade: fácil


Ver esta trilha no Google Maps

Esta trilha é bem fácil, bonita e demora entre 4 e 6 horas para percorrer. Tem duas partes bem diferentes, a primeira subindo a serra, por mais um pedaço de estrada real, e a segunda descendo pelos campos e pastos até a vila de Arapiranga. O início fica no gramado central de Rio de Contas, do lado do arquivo municipal. A rua qui sai dali vira trilha rapidamente, e sobe até o topo de um morro onde tem uma capela. Depois desce do outro lado, e sobe a serra na frente. A trilha corta uma estrada de terra várias vezes, para finalmente, no topo, não continuar mais, dai se segue a estrada, descendo lentamente através campos e pastos até chegar na vila de Arapiranga.

Em Arapiranga, além de gente bem simpático, você encontrará alguns bares e mercadinhos, mas nenhum transporte público de volta para Rio de Contas. Uma solução é procurar o táxi local (um morador que faz função de taxi) para voltar.

My animation project for this year: the Orange project

I've been thinking of a project to do this year, that would teach me something new, be small enough so I can carry it alone in the few free moments I have outside work and my other projects, and that I would be able to document completely from start to finish, including steps, difficulties found, and a try at cost/time estimation, so the experience can benefit others.

And today as I was walking in town I imagined this small scenario, that would fit perfectly in that scope. It might be simplish, but the idea is to have something small enough so I'm sure I can finish it. I'll turn it into a 2D, classical-style animation, that I'll do as always 100% with open-source software (mypaint, gimp and inkscape for sure, probably synfig too, although I'll need to train a bit with it first). I'll also try to do the soundtrack and music. The whole animation should last about 15 seconds. I'll call it provisorily "orange", in honour to the blender institute

I estimate the time to complete to a couple of months, but depending on the available time it could very well extend to a year or so. The next steps will be to build a good planning of the tasks that need to be done, beginning with rewriting a more extended scenario, drawing a storyboard and creating a spreadsheet to keep track of the time spent on this (until now about 2h to think the story, but that's just luck, and 1/2h to write this post. I'll try my best to register anything I do with this project here (I'll create a shortcut link too to access it directly).

The synopsis

On a dark, desert, moon-like planet, a tribe of alien-like humanoids armed with primitive weapons is gathered as for attacking another army. On the other side, one single man, dressed with army space suit. He then presses a button on his sleeve-integrated PDA. Immediately, several spaceships that were hanging above the scene open their bellies and drop a sea of bombs. The bombs lock themselves on the yellow eyes of the aliens. The man grins, revealing a gold tooth. The last scene shows all the bombs changing their direction, after acquiring the new target...

So that's it for now, I just hope this is neither too stupid nor too ambitious, I suppose we'll see quickly how good an idea it was. Wish me luck!

Trilha: Estrada real, Rio de Contas, Bahia, Brasil

Comprimento: 6km
Dificuldade: Fácil (partindo de Rio de Contas. Um pouco mais cansativo partindo de Livramento)


Ver esta trilha no google Maps

Uma trilha bem bonita e fácil (conte 2 a 3 horas, 4 horas se for ir até Livramento), descendo a bela serra entre Rio de Contas e Livramento. Tem 3 cachoeiras acessíveis no caminho, dá para tomar banho em todas, e vistas impressionantes do vale de Livramento. A estrada foi construída pela coroa de Portugal para permitir um melhor accesso à extração de ouro da região da chapada diamantina. Hoje a estrada não é mais usada e sobra um caminho de pedestres bem legal.

O início da trilha fica no Chalé do Raposo, atrás do bar exterior (acesso livre). A trilha é muito fácil até para quem nunca fez trilhas, não precisa de guia. A parte de estrada entre o fim da trilha e Livramento é um pouco chata.

Happy new year! To start with a fresh, new clean blog, the 2010 guesblog contents have been moved to an archive page. The tags will reappear progressively as I post stuff. To begin with, have a look at my holidays pictures from the chapada diamantina!