Notes from the first student rep meeting

Hi All,

Thanks again to the student reps for coming to yesterdays meeting and representing their groups so well.

There were a few issues raised.

1. Different tutors are asking for different things, what gets marked?

The answer to this one is always consult the marking schedule ... there is a link to it from each experiment brief. The marking schedule for experiment 1 is here. Only the things included in the marking schedule will be formally assessed.

An extension to the question is "If the assessment is the same for everybody, why do some tutors ask for different things?" I've given tutors a level of autonomy regarding how they run their studios ... this is because they are experts in their fields and know what techniques to use to get the best out of the collaboration between them and their students. So if a tutor asks for extra drawings or more sketchup modeling, for example, they are doing this because they think it will help you do better in the assessment tasks. 

2. Are students allowed to use specialized renderers and/or photoshop to add post production effects to sketchup models? Yes, here are some suggestions in no particular order ... 

SU Podium: http://suplugins.com/

Visualiser: https://getvisualizer.com/

Kerkythea (as used by Alex Hogrefe, https://visualizingarchitecture.com/ ) http://www.kerkythea.net/cms/

Shaderlight: http://www.artvps.com/

VRay (used to be industry standard, and is in our computer labs): https://www.vray.com/vray-for-sketchup/ 

and we'll be using Lumion in EXP2 and EXP3: https://lumion3d.com/product.html

3. Early release of the daily tasks: from now on I'll be releasing the daily task the day before studio, so you can take a look at it and think about it overnight before class the next day ... this should help you, and the tutors, feel more prepared for the studio session.

4. The student reps asked if I could include more examples of previous student work on the blog, with  notes on why they were successful. I'll do this over the coming week and include more examples (and set aside more time for them) in the lectures as well.

5. Can you include models from the 3d warehouse? Yes, but you must be clear about what you have made and what is from the 3d warehouse (with appropriate credit to the original author of the work). I would advise that before you download and include a range of models in your architecture that you save a copy that is finished, but empty. This way, when you come to upload your finished model it's not so large (in the past some models have blown out to 100mb or more because of the third party content they include).

Regards

Russell