30Nov2004

Salt Lake Summaries 1

This is the first in a series of short features that will uncover the highlights from a rather formidable roundtable discussion held at Salt Lake City in the ASLA 2004 Annual Conference.  The roundtable was put together by Madis Pihlak and it was titled:  Design Computing: are we there yet?  He intended to highlight progress, status and hinderances to design computing in the landscape architecture profession.

Fred Abler, a participant from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, addressed the issue of huge file sizes for 3D objects in complex rendering. He spoke of Rich Photorealistic Content(RPC) and Non Photo Realistic(NPR) which he defined as raster based and vector based respectively.  He referenced Archvision as a company that has developed a technology that enables the placing of smart hi-res images into a rendering without over loading the file(http://www.archvision.com/).

Fred Abler also brought our attention to a new 3D image resource generated at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo called Objective Networks (http://www.objectivenetworks.net) which provides models for SketchUp.  SketchUp was heavily discussed in the roundtable as a next generation (easy interface, easy to learn) conceptual design and rendering tool--free demos and free tutorials are at the WWW site (http://www.sketchup.com). 

Edward Flaherty

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