Project 1 Crit

 

 

 

THE NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN

 

 

 

 

Critical reflective review 

for the first project of the 

Master of Arts Degree in Graphic Design 

by Registered Project

 

 

 

Architectural representation of population density and poverty.

 

 

Marcus Christian Cosker

 

2nd February 2009

 

 

 

When I started this project I wanted to look at the range of housing provided for impecunious people in several countries that I have little knowledge about.  China, India and the USA were the original places I wanted to study.  As I began I found that there were two factors that were later going to become obstacles; lack of pictures of India’s standards of low-end housing and time.  This first project really has allowed me to gauge the time that I can spend doing something before I have to move on.  My initial intention of comparing the housing of these three countries became a study of the social housing of southern China’s Special Administrative Regions in Macau and Hong Kong.  This came about because of my earlier interest in the Photographic work of Michael Wolf in his photographic study of high density living areas in Hong Kong where individuals and couples routinely reside in 10ft by 10ft living areas.

 

What interests me about these buildings is their sheer size and their ruthless ‘every window is a different’ home layout.  Michael Wolfs excellent composition leaves the viewer wondering whether the building continues or ends just out of shot and captures the essence of being confined.  It was this essence that I wanted to capture in the renderings of my model.  This is why the camera angles I have chosen deliberately show what must be a typical view for the people who live in these conditions.  

 

Computer generated 3D models of buildings typically represent wealth or fiscal power of corporations.  I wanted to use this technology to show this power by modelling a good example of its antithesis – a high density social housing space.  In the case of China, a place where there is little or no personal living space, little money, little choice, little time for self, little sunlight each day.  I wanted to use the visual comparison of this to get the viewer to consider the living conditions, naturally carry out a comparison with their own housing situation and consider the motives of the model.

 

I would have liked to have been able to get the scenes rendered on a large scale such as A0 so that a viewer of the work can stand in front of the scene and use their head to look across it.  If you can get a sense of the sheer scale of the building from a small image, a large image would really have done this work justice.  Unfortunately due to computer memory restrictions I found that this was not possible with this model.

 

I made considerable use of the library during this project.  I found the Architecture section to be somewhat disorganised at times but I always walked away with more books than I could safely carry.  There were no books available on the lower-end housing in densely populated areas like Varanasi, India and Narayangang, Bangladesh apart from one that covered the disrepair of old colonial housing, while interesting it wasn’t appropriate as the buildings although shared, gave individual families a large amount of space comparable to the UK. 

 

It seems like China too wants to keep its high density housing quiet too.  I had to use Google Earth when researching the general structural shape and number of floors of the buildings in and around China’s SAR’s to start building a model.  The quality of the images aren’t great but were good enough to be able to count floors, see the road layouts and visually compare the different building shapes.  

 

When making the model I started by making ground floor box “units” and arranging them into formations that I could then easily duplicate vertically over twenty to thirty floors.  My concern was that this method meant that the units were fanning outwards at corners and every unit was completely separate to the next which I knew wasn’t a good thing because it wasted space and didn’t look like a building!  My supervisor reminded my that I could loft the outline of the building.  I got home and worked on the technique by poly-modelling; resizing alternate segments, using the thinner ones to create the balcony floors and then extruding the balcony wall itself on each level at the same time.  I didn’t spend that much time on the actual modelling of the building in comparison to the time that it took me to sort out materials and especially the lighting.  

 

When I started this project I could apply bit-maps to shapes and that was pretty much the extent of my experience with materials.  I now know how to re-scale and align materials on each face of a shape so that for example bricks align around the corner of a wall.  I know how to mix several materials together in a composite should I want to.  The most useful part of what I have learnt in terms of this project has been to use decals on planes.  This is just like putting a sticker onto the model.  I used this technique to create effects such as dirt and damp.  I used it when creating the vent and padlock and rasp for the door too.  I found using the Diffuse and Opacity maps the most useful.  On reflection I am surprised that I didn’t use the Bump map but the main scene has the objects a fair distance away from the viewer so this is no great loss.

 

Up to this point I had been developing my skills but hadn’t actually pinned down what I was intending to do.  This lack of direction in the middle of the project allowed me to look at sky-domes and cycloramas neither of which were used in the final scenes and so I have to admit that other than the experience they were a waste of my time.  Writing down exactly what I wanted to do gave me a renewed sense of focus and made me link together that it was the awe from the Michael Wolf photography that I wanted to inject into my work.  Pinning down that I wanted to render an evening scene meant that lighting was required and this caused most of my problems.  I tried just using groups of Omni lights for each window but this crashed 3D Max completely.  I tried using volumetric lighting one a single row of windows with a view of compositing the rows in photoshop later on, but the render times for just one row were prohibitive.  I spent a while making a strip of windows and doors into a material and then placing them onto a plane.  This was a good idea except of course the light in the material doesn’t light up the scene it is imported into as I found out.  This I am not actually surprised about in retrospect, however I did kick myself for going to the end of this particular path without seeing what was going to happen when I get there.  In the end I used modelled windows and doors and I used planes with self-illumination maps applied to them behind the windows so I could create the illusion of light coming out of the individual rooms.  I am so glad that this worked as I was at the end of my options and time was running out.

 

I am fairly satisfied with the visual results of this project.  Personally the journey is more important to me than the results, however looking at the model it would benefit from a more varied dirt texture on each balcony face.  The colours of the light emanating from each room should be either white or pastel colours rather than the brighter colours I have used.  I  noticed this in the last few days whilst out in the evening, even TV sets don’t change a rooms colour that much.   I have really enjoyed the journey, even the things I have looked at but discarded have been interesting.  

 

The main thing I will take forward from this experience will be my management of time and the importance of focusing on exactly what I am going to do from an early point.  This project has been a ‘funnel’ – open ended and explorative at the beginning and narrow and specific at the end.  The feedback from the project presentation tells me that I need to change the way that I carry out my study.  I need to focus on the specific aim(s) that I am working on during each project and regularly go back and ensure that I haven’t walked off that path.  As I study I need to link back to the targeted aim regularly to ensure that it’s relevant and to ensure that I can show how it links to my work during the next presentation.  I am going to achieve this by starting a mind map at the start of the next project.  I will use this during the presentation to show my trail of thought and to show the scope of things that I have looked at and the technical things that I have explored.  This will also help to show the context of the work being done.  This refocusing has made me realise that I need to change the aims in my proposal.  The changes provide more clarity rather than take anything major away from the original.

 

The second main item that came up during the presentation was the quality of the prints that I provided.  I will either buy an Canon Ink-jet photo printer or pay for the renders to be printed professionally.  Either way, the print quality will be better in future.