Looking for fellow museum designers/ resources

[nwfonseca]

Hi all, I am looking for some other museum exhibition designers. I would love to connect with other designers to see how you use VW to visualize projects. I have been working in 3D and I am looking to see how you handle adding paint colors, graphics, paintings, and objects. A lot of content I find while works great for fleshing out the architectural aspect but lacks when visualizing the above mentioned. I will give a few examples relating to above. For instance as regards paint, it is very easy to add a color to a wall in VW, but in a fair portion of my projects we will paint color bands on the walls to create "zones of content" or to frame a specific element. I have tried multiple ways to accomplish this from creating a custom renderworks texture (which can be a pain to properly scale and tile), a decal, to simply making the color blocks their own surfaces and nudge them out from the wall (however, that has issues such as having a shadow cast or a halo from ambient occlusion or the lines are visible in certain render modes) As another example, adding in artwork "paintings" can be problematic in its' own right. There are a few ways to import an image to be used but each way may not play nice with additional rendering modes. It feels to me that the one thing in common here is that not all methods work in more than one condition. What works well for one element may not work for another in the same file.
 

There is a heavy presence for lighting design for events, and architecture, but not as much for museums specifically. Does anyone know of any specific groups or resources that target us designers specifically?

[grant_PD]

I'm no museum designer, but when I've tackled problems such as this in my own work, I've used the extract surface tool and unfold surface tool to create flat elevations of the walls needing such treatments.  I then create the graphics in 2d, and save them as an image file for reimporting as a texture.  Since they are 1 to 1 with the walls I pulled from, scaling and tiling is usually not too big of an issue.  

 

I would suspect that a lot of that type of rendering is done in a separate rendering program :3ds Max/C4D etc.  

[Jeni OMalley]

nwfonseca, I am a museum exhibit designer and I am gathering up some other designers to discuss how we use VW.  We are looking specifically at best practices to set up and standardize our work flow for museum specific work.  Looks like this message happened a long time ago, but if you are still looking for connections let me know.  I would love to add to our network.

[designosaur]

On 9/1/2022 at 2:36 PM, Jeni OMalley said:

nwfonseca, I am a museum exhibit designer and I am gathering up some other designers to discuss how we use VW.  We are looking specifically at best practices to set up and standardize our work flow for museum specific work.  Looks like this message happened a long time ago, but if you are still looking for connections let me know.  I would love to add to our network.

Hi Jeni, I too am a Museum exhibition designer, interested in standardising workflows, perhaps I can join your network too?

Edited September 4, 2022 by designosaur

[Kevin K]

I include paintings on walls in many of my renderings…some framed and some not.

I generally just make an image with the correct scale/size…pretty quick and easy.

[Kevin K]

Sorry, I meant I create an image prop….again, this works well and is very accurate.

[Kevin K]

....sort of like this....lots of control by creating an image prop. just need to tweak the settings and size, but it is so smart, that when you create the image prop and choose the bitmap of the painting...the aspect ratio of the image perfectly matches the actual aspect ratio of the image.  You just may need to slightly resize it in the object info palette, etc., but the aspect ration is still maintained.

 

 

[Jesse Cogswell]

The image prop route is a really great quick and dirty way to make flat images.  But you do need to remember to kill the glow shader that is added by default if you intend to do Renderworks renderings.

[Kevin K]

Jesse, good call, I forgot to mention unchecking the constant reflectivity option. Very necessary, as you pointed out.

[grant_PD]

I read the issue as not just flat objects, but wanting to do more mural type wall coverings.  VW does not have the greatest of UV mapping tools.