California Academy of Sciences
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The California Academy of Sciences, celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2003, is planning for a major new initiative: a comprehensive rebuilding project unprecedented among the world's largest natural history museums. Once completed, the new Academy promises to be a symbol of excellence architecturally, educationally, and scientifically. Click here for more information.

This project included many interesting facets; design, visualization, physical model creation and more. Many issues were addressed via CG simulation, line of sight, massing, refractive distortion etc.

I had the pleasure of addressing these matters and seeing the stretchability of a topologically sound dataset.

California Coast Tank

RAPID PROTOTYPING

PHOTONIC SIMULATION

Updating


RAPID PROTOTYPING

Below is a photograph of one of the physical models for the project. This scale model was used to illustrate the design of the building. The California Coast tank is in the foreground. Unfortunately this photo does not do it justice. It was presented to the Academy as well as investors as part of the fund-raising effort. Note the human silhouettes so as to get a sense of scale.

I displaced the geometry of the reef, using edited photos of actual Farallone rocks. The geometric topology of the formation had to be sound, as rapid prototyping is quite specific as to the demands of the models printed. This was also important in the photonic calculations.



Design 2 Reality
 Next you can see two images of the rapid prototype model. It is over 1.5' in overall length. The radius of the rear curve needed to match the rest of the physical model perfectly in order to be usable. It would have been highly problematic attempting to solve the problems inherent in this situation. Physically modeling the formation while managing the crossviewing issues would take an unacceptable amount of time. There is also no accounting for refractive distortion during real world model creation.

I was impressed at the level of detail of the rapid prototyped model. The model was well over a million polygons, and each one was successfully rendered by the 3D printer. It is intersting to note that models such as these cost according to amount of material used, not detail level.



 

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