Friday, May 21, 2010

The Half-a-House




This is an interesting little project I am working on in Rockport, Maine. This house use to be a full cape but about 30 years ago (so the story goes) two brothers inherited the house and decided to split it - literally. One brother took his half of the house across town and the other one lived here. It's less than 1000 SF and either needs to be torn down or completely renovated.

The sketch on top was done on my Cintiq tablet. I designed the porch addition in Sketchup, a cool 3D modelling program from Google, then rendered it in another program named Piranesi. This program is amazing. It's like Photoshop in 3D. Each pixel in the exported epix file from Sketchup has material and distance-in-space information so you can just lock the planes or material and paint away without worrying about masking areas. Entourage such as cars, people, plants, etc comes into the drawing at the proper height depending on where in the image it is placed. It is really fast. This sketch was done in about 2 hours and I hit the undo button a lot! Once I was happy with it, I brought it into Artrage for some final tweaks.

I wish the renovation was going to be that easy!

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Oh man! To have those programs at my fingertips! Love your work-up. It's amazing how much the porch adds to the interest of the facade!

Jason said...

Very cool little house, I have been watching that house and I can appreciate the easy to maintain small home.

Ana said...

Hi Ken,
I loved the story of this house and the sketch so I publish it at my blog.
Thank you for another great post.
:)