Project Blog

We had only 2 days to install and test everything. It came out very well with a lot of help from C. Browning and C. Hennelly. Big thank you.

FUHU2060: flying urban housing unit from Valeria Pivovarova on Vimeo.

While the music for the is being composited in collaboration with one of the brilliant Parsons Jazz Institute students I used a cello composition by Ethan Winer to present my rough draft.

There was a lot of raw render footage from Maya that needed to be edited and composited in After Effects after.
The information labels were also added in AE using Mocha motion tracking feature. That process took some time (in weeks)

It was quite hard but very important to make a convenient rig for the 3D model, the speed of the animation process depends on it greatly. As soon as the rig was done animating the model was a simple pleasure!

Finally, when the main work on the project is done it is time to get feedback.
So I did.
Interviews with the professionals in the field of my research took a simple form of Q&A dialogue about concepts and ideas that went into FUHU2060. Different angles of the project got critique by architects, engineers, CG designers and futurists. Project got a lot of good feedback not only from the conceptual side but from stylistic and design perspectives. Interesting notes and suggestions are going to make their way into the project in the next two month. All interviews will be cut into a short documentary and posted here.

This folder is a result of an extensive research on domains and precedents for the concept of FUHU2060.

Concept research included areas like design methodology, conceptual design and it's evaluation, sci fi impact on the real technology, and work of some individuals and groups like Buckminster Fuller, Seed Mead, Daniel Simon, Archigram and Future Systems.

Research covered technologies and engineering innovations that helped developing a cohesive structure for the highly conceptual idea. Some of the technologies researched are: biomimicry, aerodynamics and aircrafting, inert gases and their chemical reactions, water thermal and draining systems, photovoltaic systems, alternative sources of energy etc.

Among many other topics I concentrated on researching urban planing, architecture and density tendencies, urban traffic systems and energy grids. This information was a base for developing a FUHU system.

In process of visualizing my ideas I looked at many directly and indirectly related projects. A lot of work went into finding visual inspirations for design, color, texture, shape and other elements of the model. Specific research was done for the visual references of the instructional/motion graphics video.

All that information was gathered and organized into the "research folder"

After the printing and gluing is done there is still a lot of work in cleaning up the print by sending it and removing the extra glue. It is a very tidies and time consuming process but there's no way around it! The most important part is to make sure that all connection areas are clean especially holes and cut outs

The articulating arm part of the model is very detailed and have some features too thin to be printed in a standard setup. For this situation the additional support structure needed to be constructed underneath the arm geometry to be able to hold it after the printing is done and to assist during the clean up process. On the image you can see the support structure underneath made in ZPrint.

Final storyboard was divided into two different style parts.
Blue regions show the 2D styled sceens of the video and Red regions - 3D styled scenes.

Style frame for a motion graphics video

These are some of the examples of 3D printing test.

The toon shader was made to imitate the hand drawn pencil scratch style that is used for the instructional motion graphics.

Using Zbrush3.1 to create a very detailed meshes I put together a new detailed design version of the FUHU2060. It has a default shading network at this point but the work on custom toon shader is in progress, it is coming soon.