Week 10

These past few weeks after finding about the change to our project we have had a few miscommunication and misunderstanding with what the client wants. After many discussions with Russell and the team we have finally fully understood what the clients wants. As a team, we now understand that we are to create a 3D model of the new part of the museum in Sketch Up that will be easy for anyone to edit and add to it. We must ensure that the Sketch Up model is well organised, with layers and objects appropriately grouped.

In class (13/5), as a group we imported one of the plans given to us (see previous posts with plans) into Rhino to obtain the correct scale. From Rhino we saved it as a dwg. in which we then imported into sketch up so it was at the correct scale. 

Image above: Screenshot of the floor plan of MERL imported into Sketch Up

In order to maintain a consistency of how elements are modelled we have decided to all work from the one Sketch Up file. Group members have done this previously in other subjects and have found this method to work. We have divided the building among ourselves in which we have given each other deadlines to meet, for example, today and Friday I will be modelling all the external walls and then passing it onto the next group member who will work on something different like internal walls or doors/ windows. By setting deadlines this will motivate us to invest time and effort into the project and to ensure that everyone in the group contributes equally. 

One problem that we did encounter was that the multiple plans we were given by Adam (Project Officer at MERL) did not contain any vertical dimensions, which we need to know to create accurate heights of walls and the overall building. As a group, we spent some time after the studio class to find out the best way to measure the height of the building with the plans we were given. We found it quite difficult to do this in Sketch Up, so we resulted in importing one of the section plans into ArchiCad which had a little bit more information than other sections to determine the height of the museum. 

Some problems that we may encounter is having limited idea/ resources that shows us details of the museum. In the plans given there was a lot of plans and detailed sections which had limited information. The best we can do is get in contact with either Adam (Project Officer at MERL) or someone else at the museum to help us take some pictures of details in the museum or give us more detailed plans.

Progress

Image above: Slowly building up the walls

As mentioned above, the plans, sections and elevations we were given did not have much dimensions on it. My group member, Aram, thought of a clever way to import the sections into ArchiCad and scale it on there to find the height or width of certain parts of the building. This made everything a lot easier and will help us in creating an accurate and scaled model.