Oxford Brookes News - Bauhaus Solar Award

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/schools/be/news/items/011110.html

London Futures / Metro and Museum of London competition 2010

‘All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks  and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly. They launched themselves into the wake of the cutter, snapping at the insects dislodged from the air weed and rotting logs, then swam through the windows and clambered up the staircase to their former vantage point. Without the reptiles, the lagoons and creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time boardrooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.’

Inspired by ‘The Drowned World’ by J.G.Ballard the image explores a future where climate change has turned London into a tropical world where lizards have taken over and the only way to move across the city is by boat.

London Futures displays 14 arresting photomontages imagining how London could be affected by climate change will be on display at the Museum of London from 1 October 2010 to 6 March 2011. The display and events form part of the Mayor’s Story of London festival and the events are funded by Renaissance London.


Like postcards from the future, familiar views of the capital have been digitally transformed by illustrators Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones. They bring home the full impact of global warming, food scarcity, rising sea levels and how all Londoners will need to innovate and adapt to survive.


The winner will be chosen by curator Cathy Ross, illustrators Robert Graves and Didier Madoc-Jones and Metro’s picture editor Alan Sparrow and announced on 2 November 2010 at a talk at the Museum of London.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/55320872@N05/5133002727/
[Link may only work if you sign in to Flickr] 
  
Sadly, i didnt win, but this guy did - http://www.krop.com/tehee/  Fair play to him.

Strap modeling and materials

Test render for the aligator leather strap

Competition presentation boards

[MORPHOTIC]

Latest modeling from the [morphotic] project.
3ds max, Vray.

Bauhaus Solar Award nominee!

In August the jury selected 12 projects to enter the final stage of the competition and i got through with my solar filtration project. I now have 2 weeks to produce presentation boards to show a jury in Erfurt, Germany in November. Lots to do!


http://www.bauhaus-solar-award.de/

Buckminster Fuller Institute

My third year project has made it to the Buckminster Fuller Institute website. Check it out here!

MORPHOTIC

'MORPHOTIC' is an experimental project by myself and Paul Nicholls which explores the animated morphosis of form, material and light. We will experiment with Realflow 5 and aim to create a short film with 5 images.

3D product modeling

A project of mine to model a Longines watch. Here is the first stages of the max model.

Car compositing test

3ds max, Vray, Nuke

The car animation will be composited onto live footage of an interview. The car is thrown out of the way in a playful way before a proposed tube station pops up in its place.

Compositing car into scene

My first job at squint/opera. As part of a film for a new development in 9 Elms, Battersea, London.

Some images for the Solar award competition

funnel detail

2010 and 2048 - before and after flood

Bulb with click pencils

Another practice with using Vray with 3ds max

Competition - Bauhaus SOLAR award 2010

During the next few weeks i will be developing my 3rd year semester one project looking at flooded London in 2048 as an entry for the Bauhaus solar award competition in Germany. I am hoping to develop an innovative approach to renewable energy and technologies in a possible future environment.

VRAY - box of bolts

Using Vray. A simple scene with an old cardboard box of bolts nuts and washers on a wooden floor. Post in photoshop

Year 3 Semester 2- [Sci Fi] - Manhattan Spiritual Sanctuary of Worship [M2SW]

After reading my chosen Ecological Sci Fi novel - ‘The Drowned World’ last semester I chose to carry on with some of the themes within the book. It is 2048, New York has flooded and it has turned tropical. A vast majority of the population has either died or gone elsewhere to seek refuge. But some have stayed. Evolution is increasing rapidly and various animal and plant life are beginning to change. One noticeable change is the iguana. It has grown, become more aggressive and is threatening what communities New York has left. This idea of the iguana becoming more powerful and more dominant than man is what inspired me to follow the direction I have.

Design Brief:
The design brief for Semester two is titled ‘Manhattan Sanctuary of Spiritual Worship.’ It is a place of worship and hope for the New Yorkers who are living amidst the new Ecological disaster.
The sanctuary design will not be a church or temple as we currently know them, nor will it practice religions or traditional rituals as they once existed in 2010. It will be a place of collective worship in which a group of a maximum of 100 people can congregate.

Personal Brief:
As a place of hope or worship, M2SW will become a building that celebrates life, by sacrificing the Giant Iguana. With such an overpopulation of the beasts and with limited food supplies for the remaining survivors of New York, killing them will be beneficial because:

1) Food will be frequently available.
2) A dangerous creature will be removed from society.

Food is a solid substance that provides nutrition and energy for the body to keep it alive. Without food we cannot live. This act of sacrifice will remove the evil from the world, as well as give life to those trying to survive. The building will become a hunter, sending out various hunter robots to capture the iguana. They will be brought back where they will be ceremonially sacrificed. They are then taken into the abattoir where they are processed for human communal consumption.

Squint/Opera internship

I've got an internship working at squint/opera

Exploded axo

Sections

Some internal images

3dsmax and photoshop

Arriving by boat

Beneath the water

An image i've done showing the conditions under the water showing the cooling tubes for ventilation and the thawt turbines for tidal power generation.

Final Viz 2

Spiders and iguana

So after the brainstorming of how these drone integrate into the city and building i created this image to represent the idea of forcing the giant iguana's out of their nests (abandoned buildings). Here 2 drones are intimidating the iguana to move. If it doesnt move, more will be sent, until it dives into the floodwater outside for the waiting hunter.

Seeker drone

Mechanical Spiders

Spiders working as a team

Spider exploring deserted building 01

Just experimenting with compositing my spider into different scenes. Annoyingly the original image was small so a bit of blurring has occured. Im not sure if it's successful but i like the idea of this image

Mechanical spiders underwater

The concept of these is still in a primitive stage. But what i am proposing is that these spider drones(lots of them! like 50 (maybe more - hundreds?) are scattered all round the city, maybe working in pairs or more. They have the ability to swim as well as crawl into deserted buildings. They then seek out iguana in abandoned rooms of hotels, offices and apartments and notify the hunter by sending it a signal so that the hunter knows where iguana are situated. The spiders can then force out the iguana by probing it or generally scaring it from its nest. It will then escape and dive into the flood water where the hunter will be ready waiting. The two machines work together as a team, both being able to do different things. The drones could also act as a survivor locator, seeking out people and seeing where they live to keep a count on human population. They can also be general eyes on the city. Mobile CCTV bots?
Comments welcome.

Waste Conveyor

Here is the waste conveyor which takes the unwanted parts of the iguana under thewalking platform and goes to one of the support columns where a waste removal boat disposes of it.
Sorry about the graphic nature of the image. Hope it's not too disturbing.

Abattoir interior

3ds max and photoshop.

Abattoir test renders

Here you can see the production line of how the iguana is prepared for consumption. I'm pretty happy how the intenal mapping (from a cow) of the carcass went.

Up the stairs

Inside the slaughter arena

Im not too happy with this at the moment. It also needs to be populated more with crowds. However i am finding it hard finding people at that angle and cheering etc and also not wearing football shirts. I shall keep looking.

Pontoon boat parking level

Here we have the pontoon which adapts to the tidal levels of the floodwater. Boats can park up and the public have access two main stairs. The other one is for the workers. As you can see the stairs are fixed to the existing neighbouring building. They have a ladder going up to a small platform. This ladder goes through a hole in the pontoon and so won't be effected by the pontoon rising or falling.

M2SW meat stamp

This is the stamp of quality that goes on the iguana carcass.

Suspension cable connections

These are the main elements that connect the building to the support column and then to the ground. The concrete foundation of the 3rd image can be seen sticking out of the waterith algae lines suggests that there is a tidal change. I have tried to get life in all three images rather than them being illustrations of a functioning part of the building, whether it is a little bird relaxing or a man in bright blue swimming pants cruising past in his boat. I think it provides more interest to the images.

In the first image i wanted to play with depth of field to help focus on the specific element of the structure and to help increase photorealism. It wasnt necessary for the other two as there was less going on in the image.