'Best Use of Idaho Wood' Competition

Now that school is finally over and I've got a bit of time to catch up on things, I thought I'd do a quick couple of posts to this blog.  I have quite a bit of new work to show, but the main two things are my graduate 553 studio work and my thesis.

The 553 studio culminated in a little in-school competition.  It was oriented around using Idaho wood products in a beautiful and unique way.  A member of Olson Kundig Architect's came to judge as well as a local Idaho architect and a representative from the Forest Products Commission.

Anyway, long story short I was lucky enough to place 1st in the comp!  There were lots of great entries, so it was a lot of fun to see the judges give feedback and critique.

Here are the boards.  They were printed as (2) 24x36 units, landscape and mounted one on top of the other.  I reduced the DPI for uploading.

Final competition boards

This project was actually before my render farm (last Fall.)  It would have been nice to have had it.  Even though I wasn't doing a movie (maybe I would have?), I find that the iterative process is much quicker and agile when you have 32 high speed processor threads at your disposal.  So, in other words, rendering power doesn't just help the images, it helps the design!

North side at night

As far as rendering goes, it was Max + Vray + GrowFX etc.  All the plants, gravel, etc are 3d.  It ended up being a fairly heft scene, largely thanks to the conifer needs etc.  I can't remember the scene size but I think it was in the 18gb range when it came to render time.  I really enjoyed this project since it was a whole semester.  Also I have a love-hate relationship with competitions.  I love to win and hate to lose, so the whole semester I had a certain tension hanging over me.  I think everyone feels that, though.