Wednesday, 02-25-15

Today was the first day after the five day weekend. I was feeling groggy, but I registered for my AP exams and then squared some of the last of my college applications away in preparation for my jump into scholarship application season, which is now in full swing. I spent the rest of the period writing and thinking on my project, trying (struggling) to get back on top of what I was doing.

Wednesday, 02-18-15

I was not feeling very well today, so I worked on the SketchUp tutorials again. I can now make many basic polyhedrons and am moving on to more advanced attributes. I also searched for a few more companies that worked in architectural visualization in virtual reality, and found IrisVR, a company that makes a piece of conversion software that "instantly" turns normal digital 3D models into immersive versions of the same thing that can be viewed with virtual reality hardware like Oculus Rift. Lastly, I wrote some more on some of my earlier findings and am starting to think about a plan of action for the remaining time I have to work on my thesis.

Monday, 02-16-2015

Today, I did some more reading and examined a popular CAD program, SketchUp, for the first time. I found several industry blogs dealing with photo-realistic architectural visualization and techniques for making display models look more realistic, and another article on how digital cameras and the human eyes differ in the way that they capture images. After all of the discussion of CAD software I found, I decided to go out and get some of my own so that I could get a basic feel for the technology. I downloaded SketchUp, and spent an hour or two later in the day fiddling with its tutorials. I cannot allow myself to become too bogged down in the details, but I think that paying some attention to the nuts and bolts of the architectural rendering process is worth my while if it helps me to understand the spirit of the process as a whole.

Wednesday, 02-04-15

I was absent for the first half of the day today, so I was not in class.