Tuesday 10th December, Second Formative Assessment & Planning for the Final Submission...

Today we had our final formative review, so we printed out A2 copies of our Design Sheets. These last few days Nia has been working on them in response to our last formative review, constructing a narrative in the presentation of the work like I had discussed in my third blog entry. In the review we did a peer assessment and discussed what we could improve on while we annotated our sheets with post-it notes. Seeing the sheets in real life gave me a sense of scale, I was able to further understand the importance of text and image hierarchy, some images were barely visible while, some were were so big, that unnecessary focus was being put on them. We also realised that by creating a linear layout the images and annotations could be read in a certain order.

Second Iteration of Design Sheets.

In the last week I have been working on the sections, I begun by taking a screenshot on Lumion using the 'Orthographic View' in the special effects tab on camera mode which allowed me to cut through sections of the model at specific angles. I then took the screenshot onto Photoshop where I added hatching in the walls, a title, scale bar and silhouettes of people, this gave a sense of scale, atmosphere and clarity to the renders. However, when printed out I realised they looked too dark and the space looked like a basement and lacked a sense of life so I went onto Photoshop again and turned the contrast up, which made the space appear bigger and more colourful.

Long Section before and after turning the contrast up.

Short Section before and after turning the contrast up.

Using Photoshop to finish the renders was really useful as it was the last software I wanted to learn before the Christmas break. Now I only had the floor plans left to render, so I took a screenshot of the Lumion model from above using the Orthographic View again. Then on Photoshop I layered the AutoCad Floor Plan on top and added hatching in the walls and silhouettes of people, the same way I did with the sections. With these Orthographic renders now finished, I sent them to Nia, she finished the sheets, adding the remaining work such as the technical drawings of the fine model. It was really challenging having to covert the In-Design file into a PDF as the quality kept turning bad although, eventually we figured it out. Our group work for Design: Adaptive Re-Use was finished!

This module has been the hardest project I have done in university so far, however it has been the most rewarding one. I have learnt how to use AutoCad, SketchUp, Lumion, Photoshop and InDesign in the span of a month, I have improved my interdependent skills, I am more resilient and more knowledgeable on the process of Architectural design.

Rendered Ground Floor and Mezzanine Plans.