OUR BAD NEWS BEARS MOMENT

Friday was such a nightmare. Simon and I were shaky and brain dead in the "New York office", aka my apartment, and just at the moment when we discovered a flaw in our system of flattening these pieces to be cut, it was suggested to Simon and I that we were being totally bass- ackwards in the way we were executing this process, which is basically doing it by hand. We were stunned at this notion that we had been dumbly doing the work any computer could do, and too tired to argue about it. We were chided that this sort of process it what parametric modeling is designed to do, and that we were slaving away for no reason, and we'd never get it done. Simon and I felt like fools: we had wasted weeks working night and day, it wasn't gonna get built, and I was about to go to Iceland and sit on my hands because there was no way we'd solve this problem.

We were told that there was a guy who had the panacea programming solution to our troubles, and that we could just sit back and push a few buttons and the whole model would be laid out on metal, lasercut, and labelled in a couple of hours. It was just a matter of convincing him to do it.
With that, Simon left the "office", dejected. We thought it was all over. We called it a day. I was so anxious and shaky and worried that it was somehow my fault, so I went to my friend Tiffany's restaurant and waited for her to get off work and meet up with another old friend visiting from Chicago, Lily Chumley. After I told Lily my troubles, she convinced me that the project would go ahead just fine, and that worst case scenario maybe 10% of the pieces were fucked up. It would stand, she promised. I was just delirious and confused. Tiffany poured me a glass of prosecco and smiled.
We then went to the bar next door and paid too much for delicious drinks. I stumbled home wasted and passed out while Lily worked on her course syllabus for her anthropology classes.
The next day, Addi skyped with some good news:



it was totally working.
Not only were we able to verify the normals on our side, but Addi talked to the Rhino expert and was told that there was no magic solution, and that we were doing this the most efficient way possible under the time constraints.




In your face, parametric modeling!!!!
God knows I wish there was a less boring and repetitive way to get this done, but we have no time to screw around trying to find it.



pretty cool huh? I hope all of Reykjavik loves the finished product. My feelings will be hurt if they don't, though this is mostly Addi's baby. It's our baby now!

IN THE PALACE OF NORMALS REVERSED

So I am waiting for the 7.5 mm red balls to split the corners of our vertices. This after spending a lovely spring afternoon indoors reversing the normals of our model. What the hell, you ask, am I talking about? And why must you suffer through it? Friends, I am talking about this:







This creature will actually be about the size of my apartment in Brooklyn. It's a model of the pavillion we are constructing in Iceland. The man on the podium is Reykjavk's first sheriff. Addi has been up for about 5 days, I think, pulling the model out of Maya over in Reykjavik and emailing chunks of it into our hot little hands here in New York.
My whole body is very, very sore from crouching at the monitor turning all those triangles you see making up this anenome shape into flat shop drawings for the laser cutter. Hence the red balls, the geometry is subtracted from the corners to keep people's eyes from getting poked out.




When I feel more coherent I'll run through the process with you. We were supposed to start cutting the aluminum (excuuuuuusssse me, aluminium) yesterday. Umm.... yeah. We didn't. Instead, we had a team mini- meltdown, questioning the veracity of our model, specifically whether the pieces were flipping orientation coming out of Maya or when we offset the surface in Rhino. It had been about three days since Simon and I had slept more than two hours, and Addi more than that.


There was a whole lot of grim Skype conversations back and forth, and pleas to parametric modeling expert dudes we had never met before to help us find a more automated way of executing the model, since we humans just weren't working fast enough. Considering we're supposed to be done on Thursday and accounting for sleep deprivation, I think we are being pretty civil to each other.



Happily, though, I got the copy of my favorite Fall album in the mail today, and a long night of sleep, like 9 hours! First time in a while. Listening to The Fall takes me back to long ago bedrooms, listening to headphones and rolling my adolescent eyes. It's one of those albums that linger in your sense memory years after you don't own it anymore.