Summary of the inventions shown here: Kinetic Stairs: A new kind of stairs that can fold up into the wall when not in use. It also looks like a stunning piece of art whether folded up or not! Cascade Wall: The (possible) future of home design: modular walls! These walls can fold up on the ground when they aren’t needed, and can be moved in two directions using an overhead track system to rearrange them. They also have two colors (one on each side), and can be toggled between the two colors using a Jacob’s Ladder-style cascading system. That’s how these walls get their name, by the way! Torsion: A new kind of room-darkening shade system that uses flexible metal sheets which can twist to either let more or less light in. It also just looks way cooler than standard shades! Batten Bed: A bed that can retract into the ceiling when not in use. It also includes a privacy screen that extends and retracts alongside the bed, and it even has the ability to cover up and reveal a picture behind the bed as it goes up or down. Light, Air, Movement: A mechanical air ventilation system for a greenhouse or similar building. It uses a series of movable glass panes in the roof to either open or close the vents. As with Torsion, the control for the vents is a set of four large wheels at floor level, and as such, it either requires four people to work together at once or one person opening each set of vents in sequence. SonoTune: A brand new kind of adjustable acoustic wall system for a theater or similar venue. Each “cell” of the wall can open and close like a flower, and in doing so, can change the acoustics of a room drastically in seconds. Featherlight: A covered boat dock with a mechanical door that resembles a feather, as the name suggests. It looks incredible when it opens or closes, and is truly the most unique door ever created! Also the most unique boat dock design ever created! transFORMation: A gathering place for native peoples, featuring a mechanical retractable roof, waving roof flaps powered by water, and a fire pit with a hinged lid in the center. Truly a work of art!
You can watch other Kinetic installations on our channel EpidemicVideo, as The 3D Water Matrix (2014) designed to create animated water droplets artworks. The 3D Water Matrix was premiered at Cité des sciences et de l’industrie of Paris from April 2014 to January 2015 and was exhibited last year at ZKM, Karlsruhe and MACRO Testaccio in Rome. It is actually exhibited at Power Station of Art in Shanghai until the 30th of July before to come back to Europe at Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels in October and Le Manège, Mauberge in November. Since the premiere, three artists have been commissioned to produce artworks for this project : Shiro Takatani (Japan), Christian Partos (Sweden) and Ulf Langheinrich (Germany). The 3D Water Matrix got a CODAaward in 2015. Other commissions are on process.
Were some of the models made in Rhino and the rest in 3ds Max? These are incredible videos. They look so real! I am looking at doing something like this, this semester!
Most of us used solid works to model the moving parts and soft image to animate. Some people used 3ds max to animate, and I'd recommend that route since Autodesk killed soft image a couple years ago.
matthew stockton We were taught Solid Works and Soft Image in a 9 week program. The projects were done by University of Oregon architecture students paired with Emily Carr University product design students. A few of the product design students had previous animation experience. The construction detail you reference was done by a solo product design student with 10+ years of professional experience in animation. He also used 3ds max to animate and After Effects to edit. He was an outlier for sure.
