Okay, what is up guys! Welcome back to Archi Hacks
Today we're gonna be taking a look at making B.I.G diagram or BIG diagram
BIG is famous for using their diagrams to explain their buildings and concepts
to non professionals and it's interesting because their buildings are
very iconic because they just look like they're diagrams and these diagrams are
usually presented in this axonometric format, and they're very intuitive
that even non professionals can easily understand and they end up having this
very interesting and iconic look which makes big a very interesting architect
in the field right now. Today we're gonna be taking a look at creating
this diagram using rhino I've seen some tutorials online on using
other software such as sketchup and photoshop but today we'll be using pure
rhino and illustrator which is the way we actually do it at big. Now, let's take a look.
First off, I'm gonna be using VIA 57 as our example project so
we'll steal some dimensions out of here so I'm in Google Earth right now and
it's fully modeled in 3d and I'll take out the ruler tool to measure the sides
of the building to get the actual dimensions so the long side it seems to
be about 150 meters and the short side is approximately 60 meters so I'll be
using those dimensions for the base and secondly I need the height of a building
so I quickly googled VIA 57 height and it turns out to be 467 feet and I've
translated up two meters so it's approximately 140 meters now I'll get to
right now and let's start modeling first off the podium is about 150 meters long
and 60 meters wide, and about 10 meters tall
and I'll click that and type in the solid points on. I'll take one corner and
raise it by 130 meters that brings us to total of 140 now we're
in millimeters right now so I'll just quickly go into options units and
changes to meters say okay and I should say no it's such a way that the scale
stays the same but only the unit changes as you can see the short side is 60
meters and everything is good now right now we're missing the courtyard so I'll
just go to the top view and start copying this out so first off I'll trace
the outline of the building like so and I'll click the new geometry and type in
offset surface now I'll first off flip the direction because we want the
courtyard to be smaller than our building and a distance will be about 18
meters and hit enter one more time and once we delete the outside original
geometry you'll see the new geometry that was offset it from the original
now this geometry is about 18 metres offset from the outside of our site
which gives us 18 metre depth of the slab which is typical for in residential
buildings now here's the full model of via 57 now what we're gonna do is first
off switch our perspective to axonometric parallel view
place our perspective just right so that we can see the courtyard and the
building in a presentable way
That looks pretty close
I'll select the geometry and type in make 2d
I'll maintain source layers it doesn't really matter
because then you have one layer everything looks good say okay now you
got these set of curves which are projection of what we were looking at in perspective
As you can see if you pull it out a little bit this 2d geometry
that looks just like what we can see I am perspective I'll go ahead and hide
this for the time being and here is our lines now the thing about big diagram is
that they always have this strong bold line to highlight their building which
makes it really cartoony and makes it stand out from the other background and
the easy way to do it instead of purely just tracing it all around is to select
all lines and type in curve boolean and just hit outside which will
create the outline of all the curves you selected now make sure to place this on
a separate layer and say outlines and maybe the new geometry or the regular
lines can call thin lines there we go now I'll just collapse the layers
Type in 'purge' to remove unnecessary layers
okay and I'll change the layer color to distinguish which one is which
I guess I forgot okay ten lines are out there and outlines are on this
Thin lines are out there, and outlines are on this layer
I need to move left to that layer. Currently it's on default so I'll move that
Right click on the layer name and change objects layer and maybe I'll
set the color to red so we can clearly visualize it.
There we go. Alright so we'll take that and say 'export.' When this pops up, save in a folder
somewhere you can remember. (For name we'll) say, 'BIG diagram,' and I'll change the format to
Adobe Illustrator now quick way to do it is to just press tab and hit 'a' 'a' and
it'll put you right at illustrator. As for options, we'll just leave
everything to normal. This diagram doesn't have a scale so it should be alright
but make sure to keep it consistent when you want to make new additions.
We'll open up the illustrator file that we have just exported and here it is!
I'll make the composition a little smaller maybe I'll make it about
500 pixels to 500 pixels and we'll do that
I'll hit 'ctrl' + '0' to make the artboard fit in, and I'll 'cntrl' + 'X' or edit > cut
they put in the clipboard and paste it again. What this does is,
it places the illustration right in the middle of your canvas which is really helpful
If you go over to the layers tab, you can see that there are two layers one is the
outline in red and the other is neon green which is just the thin lines.
First off, I'm gonna select all by ctrl + a and change the stroke color to black
Right now, you can only see one type of line but well first off go ahead to red layer
and click on this area to select everything on that layer and increase
the weight to about, say three. Now we're almost there, pretty close.
As might have noticed, some of the diagrams have shadings and the others are just
filled in with solid color - as you can see. The way we do it is by using the
paint bucket tool. I'm first off when I go ahead and lock the outline layer
because you don't want to touch that and select only the inside thin lines and go
over to paint bucket tool or you can hit K. Some people say this is a cheesy
way to do this but I think it's a quick and dirty way and it works pretty well
First off, I'm gonna click on the geometry to activate the tool and
as you can see using the Live Paint tool you can fill in the areas that are
enclosed by lines and you can fill them in with different colors. I'll show you how.
Right now, we're just in 'no fill' and 'black outline'
but we want the inside to be green courtyard so we'll sample some nice neon green color
and click in the middle. Secondly, we're gonna go over to the dark
side of the building and make it slightly dark color. So I'll first
refresh that to white color, go over to fill and we'll shade it in to about...
this looks pretty good. Yeah, I'll do that. Like in these two areas.
As you can see, they're colored in different areas colored with different colors.
You just keep changing colors to start painting in areas that you want to paint.
maybe this side can be a little lighter and finally the top obviously gets the
most amount of Sun and so it can be lightest. Now you can hit 'V,' or go back
to selection tool and click away, you can see that everything is nice and clean
That's about it! This is how you create big diagram.
Thanks for watching today's episode of our Archi Hacks.
I'm currently an intern at BIG and this is actually how we do it here.
I've seen a couple tutorials online and by far, this is the fastest and cleanest way to do it.
There's a part two to this tutorial illustrating how to make arrows and step-by-step diagrams
So if you are interested, be sure to check that out as well.
This is it for today I'll see you guys next time