Italian Street Art in Florence

We shortly spent an extended weekend in the old italian city of Florence. Our primary interest was to tick off another UNESCO world heritage site for our collection. Also I wanted to see how the capital of Tuscany feels today, maybe 30 years after I had first visited it with my class at high school.

Strolling around the old city, looking for historic architecture, visiting famous museums and  enjoying ancient masterpieces of art, we saw a few small piece of graffiti every now and there. While some of them showed the typical scribbling which is totally meaningless to me, we discovered a few which I really liked. So I started taking pictures of them.

The more we looked around, the more of them we found. Some of them are citations of well-known paintings like the “lady with the pearl earring”, originally painted by Jan Vermeer. Others are more like stickman drawings, like the ones of an artist signing with “K”. Very simplistic, but always with a twinkle in the eye and a little humour or irony which make the viewer start thinking. And even some modern sculpture groups can be found in the old alleyways.

But why write more? Have a look and see yourself…

Almost there

Outer are is still work in progress

It has been far too long that I did not write an article here… The plan was to have one post per month at least – but sometimes things prove to become different from what one had planned for.

Yer, despite all the work and the lack of time there are good things happening!

Since the screed had been poured in our new apartment, the weeks until it tried out felt like a never-ending story. And suddenly, all the missing details fall into place and from next week on we should finally be proud owners of our 4 walls!

Master bathroom is almost ready for use

You may get a first impression from the pictures. The outer area and the neighbour houses at the property still need to be finalized. But after the kitchen has been set up, we will be moving in the first week of December.

What a Christmas present this will be!

Kitchen and dining area

Looking the other direction towards the living room

View from the living room over the right half of the roof garden

Happy Easter Holidays!

I wish all my followers, friends and family a few happy and relaxing Easter holidays!

This little video was created with data that I captured with an Asus XTION Pro Live using FARO´s SCENECT software. After capturing and processing the data, I created the animation with a beta version of the new Video Pro App that will soon be available for FARO´s SCENE software family.

Back to the roots!

Diana+ F in action, Pragfriedhof Stuttgart

What a fun!

After years of using digital cameras only for my photography, I got a magnificent Diana F+ from my family for Birthday. This camera is a modified version of a model from the 60s now produced by Lomography.

Completely built from plastics, this camera feels like a real time warp. I think just the carrying belt of my Canon EOS 60D weighs more than the whole camera including the funny flash. It offers 3 f-stop setting (sunny, partly cloudy and cloudy), 3 focus positions and 2 exposure times (“the” pre-set exposure time or “B” for as long as you hold the trigger). Despite its simplicity it even allows the photographer to choose from a set of lenses. The climax of luxury is the plug-in flash that comes with the Diana.

By default it works with a 120 film.I had never worked with that type of roll film before. And it turned out to be very surprising experience as I expected it to be much more complicated than it really is.

Like an angel

Reading about Lomography cameras and all their surrealistic colors and heavy vignette in magazines and on websites since years, I was curious in how my new old camera will work. So we used a beautifully sunny Sunday and took off to a photo safari to an old cemetery in Stuttgart (Pragfriedhof). After completing the film with some indoor shots – amazing how long it takes to capture 12 pictures if you know you only have these 12 – I just today got my first analogue pictures since years back from the laboratory.

What shall I say? Not all pictures of the first film are useable. But most of them are – take a look!

There are still a lot of lenses and other accessories in my kit that I did not try yet. I am bursting with curiosity!

Tombstone, Stuttgart Pragfriedhof

The missing head.
With a DSLR you have much more control – but much less thrill!

Cemetary, Stuttgart Pragfriedhof

Jump!

Blurred Time

Sandra cooking

Fire

Building Shell finished – time to do some Laser Scanning

First round of scans available on the internet via the web viewer  for 3D laser scan data SCENE WebShare

As the builders completed the building shell of our new apartment right before Christmas, it was obvious that we would use the holidays to take the first laser scans.I brought my FARO Focus 3D from the office home and we went off to capture the current as-built state. After a little more than 1 hour we were finished recording 14 scan positions inside the apartment, on the balcony and the roof garden. Although the interior walls are not erected yet, it took me a few scans more than I expected because the whole indoor area is filled with supporting poles to hold the freshly casted ceiling slab.

Because we always lack of good example scan data which can be published for marketing purposes, I will use this data also for professional purposes. Therefore the results can be found at FARO demo WebShare server at: www.farowebshare.com

Overlaying the 2D or 3D CAD data with the 3D laser scan data of the as-built situation reveals the accuracy of the construction.

The comparison of the scan data with the 2D drawings from the architect as well as with the 3D Revit model I created myself showed that the accuracy of the buildings main structure seems to be pretty good.

As a little gimmick to show the 3D scan data to all those who do not have experience with 3D laser scanning, I created a short fly through video from the scan data. In case you wonder where the data of myself sitting on the roof garden is coming from: A colleague of mine had scanned me at work using our new SCENECT software together with an Asus Xtion Po Live. I just took this data and placed it within the data of the apartment before I rendered the video. Maybe I will write an article about the SCENECT within the next weeks.

We are already waiting for the builders to set up the interior walls. Once this is done – currently they are on winter vacation – we will go in again and do another round of 3D laser scanning.

First time in our own four walls

I have to admit, I sometimes thought it is a bit childish if you have to listen people talking about the progress on their construction site like expectant parents about their baby. But last Sunday, standing the first time in the building shell of our new apartment was really a great experience. Currently it is mostly one large room because all the dry walls are still missing. But looking out of the windows, standing on the balcony and the roof terrace the first time overlooking our new neighbourhood was just amazing!

Entrance door

View over the construction site – building shell of our apartment is finally finished

Stairway to heaven…

That’s how it will feel like entering the apartment from the elevator

Hard to imagine that this will become our master bathroom and the kitchen

This will become our bedroom

Hopefully they will build some dry walls around our guest bathroom

With a few dry walls this will become our home office

Looking from the kitchen over the dining area towards the living room

Walls are missing so we can look from the bedroom through the bathroom into the kitchen

A great view out of the living room – once the windows and the heating will be in I will not need a winter jacket anymore

The first parts of our utility room

View from the bedroom side of the balcony northwards over the Neckar valley

View from the bedroom side of the balcony north-eastwards

Looking from the end of the roof terrace towards the home office door

Looking south-west from the roof terrace

Looking north-west from the roof terrace

Looking from the roof terrace towards the valley of river Neckar

Kitchen´s balcony door

View from the kitchen side of the balcony southwards

The next building opposite of the balcony

View from the kitchen side of the balcony along the apartment towards the Neckar valley

How cool – looking over the new neighbourhood

View out of the bedroom over the valley of river Neckar

Definitely enough space for two cars!

Standing on our neighbours roof terrace looking over to our apartment

Standing the first time on the roof terrace feels great!

The first glance out of the window

5 cranes on 1 construction site – looks like they want to get things done before winter.

Wow, the building company is really pushing now. Since today we have five cranes at our construction site!
And the builders even work on Saturday morning…

We just came back from our weekly walk to the site. The floor of our apartment has been casted in the meantime and the elevator shaft has been poured as well. Its getting really serious now for us.

Looking west wards out of the second floor. In the background one can see the Neckar valley.

As we found the fence standing open just in front of our future stair case, we used the occasion to have a first look into the building. In my mind I almost heard the “bing” of the elevator before its doors swung open to bring us to the roof garden floor.

Unfortunately, we could not get up into our floor because the stairs are still missing. But at least we took a first glance out of the windows of the second floor. Now we just have to add another 3 meters in height in our imagination.

In eastern direction we can overlook the other buildings of our block.

How can it take another 8 months or so before we can move in? We are almost bursting from pleasant anticipation!

Choosing the right design tool

As a 3D professional and tech savvy person, I, of course, want to plan the interior design of our new apartment with the help of modern computer based tools.
But which tool would be the most suitable?

As this is for private use, this would be my requirements:

• 3-dimensional
• low-cost
• possibility to combine it with 3D laser scan data (I am already looking forward to set up my scanner the first time on the construction site…)
• available on my Mac
• reasonable learning effort

The first step in Autodesk´s Homestyler.com

In case you are reading this blog frequently, you may know that I made my frist trials with Homestyler by Autodesk. Apparently this system fulfilled all the requirements above. But mainly the limited viewing possibilities and difficulties when trying to accurately place furniture let me stop moving along this path.

My next trials were made with SketchUp. This software in the meantime belongs to Trimble (was owned by Google before). There is a free-of-cost version available for iOS as well.

Next experiment using SketchUp

In general SketchUp is a very interesting 3D modelling software which allows to start creating in 3D in a very intuitive way. Sketching the whole neighbourhood based on an image of the city map was quickly done. But after working with it for a while I also realized the disadvantages of the concept. While you can start very quickly, once you want to go into more detail design work it starts to become a bit tricky. Creating a building drawing according to accurate dimensions is possible, but due to the user interface concept of SketchUp drawing becomes slow and a bit cumbersome.

Modifying objects in a controlled way proved to be tricky in SketchUp

Another difficulty occurs once you try to modify objects. An apparently simple task like moving a wall by a few centimeters according to my experience results in deleting the original wall and drawing a new one.
Since also assigning colors and textures in a controlled way turned out to be a bit tricky I also went away from SketchUp.

But what´s next?
As I could not find a suitable alternative for my Mac, I decided reluctantly to move back to my company PC.

Top view of the Revit 2013 model of our new apartment

With my company being a development partner of Autodesk I enjoy the luxury of having access to all their products. So I decided to move on with Autodesk Revit 2013, a dedicated 3D CAD system for architectural and civil engineering applications. Even for people without a degree in architecture Revit is reasonably easy to learn. In fact, once you understood the concept you can work very fast with it. The software offers all necessary building elements. For furniture one can use various online libraries or design one´s own objects. In Revit they are called “families”. Family objects can be inserted into Revit projects, moved around and modified to the requirements.
What I like in particular is that the furniture I designed automatically snaps to walls and to the floor when I place them in the project. This makes moving them around very ease and I do not have to check whether an object drops through the floor or is amalgamating with the walls.
I even managed to assign colors and textures to my drawing. This lets you really get a quite realistic impression of how the finished apartment will look like.

Rendering of a view from the drawing room area towards the open kitchen. Revit 2013.

But one thing am I really missing in Revit 2013: I cannot freely walk around in the model to get a feeling how I would feel like in the real building. There are easy ways to set up a camera which then creates a still image shot with quite good rendering quality. But i cannot walk around like I am used to it from my (FARO´s) point cloud software SCENE.
Luckily, Autodesk offers another software which does exactly this. Navisworks allows to import various different CAD file formats and then freely navigate around like in a computer game. As far as I know, Navisworks ships with the Revit suite. So there is normally no additional cost involved.
One could think apart from the requirement to have a solution for my Mac all is fine now.
Yet, visiting my virtual apartment in Navisworks does somehow not look as good as it does in Revit itself. Navisworks seems to ignore the texture settings of the Revit model. Or maybe I am just not clever enough to find the right settings.

View in the opposite direction from the kitchen towards our future roof garden. Revit 2013.

Sumary:
I have not yet found the perfect tool for me.
The combination of Revit 2013 + Navisworks 2013 seems to form a usable tool. But somehow I am not fully satisfied. I would love to have the navigation capabilities of Navisworks directly built into Revit. Or, in case that would be too much of a demand, I would at least want to see my models in Navisworks at least as nicely rendered as in Revit.
Almost forgot one point: for private applications like mine, I would love to see this as a free of cost software (or at least low-cost) similar to the Homestyler idea of Autodesk which would be independent from my computer hardware.
Let´s see what the future of 3D design software will bring to us…

Almost there

Almost there – one more ceiling and our walls will be built

Not sure if you can see it on the image:
The walls of the 2nd floor of our building are finished (for all my American followers: that is the 3rd floor in your counting). This means, once the builders have casted the next ceiling, they will start setting up the walls of our apartment.
We are almost there!

I can´t wait setting up my Focus 3D laser scanner the first time to see how accurate they build to the design…

Let´s hope the winter will keep us waiting for a while still. Each additional non-frost day will make us move in faster.

Do yo need a feeding channel?

While the builders are working their way up to our floor, we are piece by piece nailing down the details. After visiting various kitchen showrooms in the last weeks, we are currently trying find out how our bathrooms should look like.

The second floor is almost ready and waiting for the ceiling to be casted.

Last weekend we had a date with the plumbing contractor of our building company to go through all the possible choices. During the whole process of buying an apartment we learnt things we never thought we would ever have to think about. But the nice lady in the showroom last week really caught me by surprise. After about 2 hours of deciding which sinks, bathtub, tabs and shower cabins and even which flush trigger we would like to have I thought we are finally ready to go home. But then she drew her final ace and asked almost incidentally: “Do you need a feed channel?” … A what? Funnily the lady obviously did not expect at all that a customer might not know what a feed channel could be. But after her explanation, which I was listening to unbelievingly, I finally know. Here we go: A feeding channel is a little opening which becomes visible if one opens the cover of the flush trigger. Behind this opening there is a little slide finally leading into the flushing tank. All this is meant to drop little tabs into the flushing tank which are colorizing the water and releasing some fragrance to make the water smell. OK – we learnt something new. But as we still don´t understand what this should be good for, this is one of the few gimmicks we did not order.