8 hour design study.

I'm still testing out ideas for designing and building my own home, using primarily shipping containers, with various sites that are currently available. This design study took about 8 hours.

Conceptually, it's a 1,920 sf (exterior dimensions) house with an accessory dwelling unit, in this case, a home office / production studio, with its own parking spot, as mandated by the jurisdiction this is located in. I'm always interested in creating spaces, so there is a low -- 3' tall -- partial retaining wall that helps isolate the space from the busy street traffic, and an elevated deck that ties in the ADU and main living area.

It's not a complete design, obviously, so I've left out a lot of fussy details. It's more of a massing and layout design.

View from East

View from Southwest

Plan View

South Elevation

North Elevation

East Elevation

West Elevation

Inserted into Google Street View, looking from Northeast

Finally rendered: Kuwait competition, blast from the past project.

I finally finished updating the Sketchup model that had been converted from 3D AutoCad, and got through rendering, following some added touches to the interior.  To create the bokeh effect, I popped some of the renders into Photoshop and applied a lens blur to a gradient mask.

Lots of work...made me wonder if it would have been easier to simply rebuild from the 2D cad files instead. Still, I've had my eye on redoing this in Sketchup for a very long time because I knew that it would come out spectacular.

Kuwait competition -- another project reworked.

Here's another blast from the past project that I worked on.  Some 12 years ago, this was built in 3D in AutoCad, then rendered via 3DS Max.  I'm still working on fixing the model up after importing it into Sketchup (there is a lot of work to be done!), but it's definitely going to be worth it.

I didn't do the design; I gave my input on the design to the head designer, though, and it reflects a lot of my personal style.

Here's a peek into where it stands right now.  When it's all done, I'll show the updated model.

Blast from the past: Wash. County Museum

I've been going through past projects, converting some 3D CAD files to Sketchup files, and putting in some extra work into adding flourishes, rerendering them and adding some extra stuff with Photoshop.  Back in the day, I relied on AutoCAD's built-in Max, and before then, the stand-alone Max to render.  Things are a lot easier and better now.

Here's one project that got the once-over treatment: Washington County Museum.  

When I first started working on this, it had been modestly designed.  In fact, it was ugly.

The project was never completed in the way it was intended because of a lack of fundraising to cover the total cost of the work, so the highlight of the project was axed.  Had they waited to start the work until they'd gotten enough funding, it would have had a spectacular entrance area and retail sales space, giving the museum a leg up for future growth.

Oh well.

Designing houses.

Something I'd love to do, is design houses.  Something I love doing right now, is finding properties online, grabbing their contours from Google Earth via Sketchup Pro, then modelling ideas.

This one, just completed.  After modelling, I exported and rendered it, then added some flourishes via Photoshop.  Took all of about 4 hours.  Obviously designing for a client with a program takes a lot longer, and this is just a facade exercise.

It also serves as a break from doing the stuff that I'm supposed to be doing, namely, re-building the ol portfolio and getting it sent out to the printer.

My Amadeus - Joseph II moment.

In Amadeus, Emperor Joseph II praises Mozart, and then tells him that his opera has too many notes, to which, Mozart queries as to which notes he should remove.

I was told to move a counter so that it's 15 feet from the front, yesterday -- all of 17 inches.  It wasn't a discussion about the pros and cons of space management and organization in one part of the scheme, just that the counter had to move so that it was 15' from the entrance.

I know it's not a perfect match, but the feeling is just the same.

An entire building, modeled in four days.

As part of a construction firm's RFP presentation, I was asked if I could produce a series of images depicting the construction work and the stages of work.  Starting from CAD floor plans - that were sloppy with walls not lining up - it took me about four days to build all 7 floors + basement.  If the CAD plans were perfect, it would have taken me about two days at most.  If I had assumed that the CAD drawings were bad, I would have used AutoCAD to fix them before importing them into SketchUp, which made it monumentally more difficult to fix.

Early design for retail.

Working on very little input, other than "old world" retail shop.  I guess this means it'll be 100% different next week.  No time to do a full rendering; just a sketchup output for now.

Retail design, continued: cash register casework concept.

Continuing with the design, finalized conceptual designs of everything before developing construction details. Today, cash register casework.

Shown are stainless steel perforated steel sheets, curved, stainless steel brackets from Sugatsune, either a gray plastic laminate or metal laminate, complete with matching black/brown wood.

Some renders of an older (last October) idea with LED lights.

As a hung pendant.

As wall fixtures with different number of wings.

Three and four wing versions.

Six, three and four wing versions, as wall fixtures...more like light sculptures.

Close view of center.

Update on retail design.

Finalized exterior, currently working on interior, including some customized furniture (built-ins and light pendants).

Sketchy view of interior, from furthest inside point of retail space.