Building By Numbers from Kisa Naumova on Vimeo.
The movie above illustrates Kisa Naumova's work to recreate 27 floors of the Leeds School of Contemporary Art and Graphic Design.
Kisa used a series of architects' drawings, traced out in Illustrator, and subsequently run through custom made scripts to automatically build the prims in exactly the right places, at the right sizes and rotations. Once in place tweaks were made by hand allowing the building to be completed in 2 days.
The process of importing site plans to automate the building process is intriguing, it points to the future whereby blue prints will be automatically imported and constructed in virtual space.
i'm intriuged by the software behind this.
ReplyDeleteWhat's the game engine? is it second life?
and what is the modeling done with?
i'd love to get an idea of the workflow...
thanks
I also would like to know more about the software backend. It starts out looking like Second Life, but is the actual construction created in SL? Very intriguing and possibly very useful! Cheers.
ReplyDeleteThe process is quite a fiddly one. I start off with the architects' drawings, and trace out all of the walls, floors, windows -- making sure not to make any object bigger than Second Life's 10m limit. Because Illustrator is 2D, I use the colour of shapes to give information about the height and position in the different channels (red=height, green=z-pos)
ReplyDeleteThen I save the drawing as an SVG, and run it through a PHP script that I wrote which translates from the XML into a series of comma-seperated lines of text that I can copy-paste into an object in SL. This object then spits out prims based on those lines, which fly themselves to the right position.
I've not explained that particularly well, I'm afraid. I should do a proper video tutorial or something. In the meantime, I've done a short sped-up film of me using the same technique to rough out some stair-cases...