 How's everybody doing? Hello, this working? Yeah, now it is. How's everybody doing? Four days of Blender, yeah Hi, so I'm gonna be talking about architecture is beauty. My name is Demeter Pushnikov. I'm from Bulgaria and I'm an architect as you might have guessed by now Yeah This thing is I Think this is not working Okay, there you go. Cool. So a little bit about me. I said I'm an architect already. I spent most of my Education time well split between the US and the UK But most of my professional time in the UK working as on big projects International projects which you're going to see and a really interesting part about that is that most of it is done with Blender Which I bet you didn't know that you can do that with architecture design So not architecture visualization, but design at the moment I run UH studio, which is my own company architecture design practice and I'm really passionate about Showing architects and designers and also 3d artists that are interested in architecture how to use Blender As part of their toolkit. So that's one of my massive passions, right? So, yeah Let's talk about design. So what is design? to me Probably if I ask all of you, you might have a different idea, but it's where beauty and function meet How and how does Blender play into this? Well, we'll check out first. I want to bring you back with me about Too many years ago now like 12 13 at my postgraduate school. It's called the AA school in London It's actually a small school that if you're an architect, you probably never heard of it But if you are an architect, you definitely heard of it And it's I did the design research lab, which is a postgraduate and mark program And that thing was super cool as you can see we got down and dirty Not only with physical things but also with digital we were doing like all kinds of strange weird scripts with Python with Processing at that point with Maya. We were playing a lot with physical trying to Simulate some things physically and then thinking about how those things could potentially look Digitally and just going back and forth the whole time and so Interaction was a really important part of the process and in case you're wondering a lot of these studies were done with Maya with 10 hair back in the day I did use Blender at that point, but you know as a student you're like, whoa So many new cookies. Which one do I take to play with? But the most important thing that I got from there was experiment Iterate evaluate and repeat and I suspect it's probably true for a lot of you, even if you're not architects and designers So let's switch big gears a little bit here. So let's talk about beauty. So what is beauty? All right. Yeah, that's beautiful right beautiful face, but what is beautiful architecture? So this is one of my favorite places in London. It's only five and a half hours from here if you take the Euro star to St. Pancras station and it's walking distance away from St. Pancras station and it's called the cold drops yard and It's merging old with new and why is it beautiful? Because it provides an excellent sense of place and identity and it's so you can see the design, right? It's got like these Things that the roof that sort of goes around and the public space that it forms So this is yeah, I think I mentioned a Hedderwick studio So it's not my project, but I absolutely love it because they show the process in their website So I can talk about it because that's the importance Right, so that's the original image that you see there the satellite photo of two warehouses So this is in an old industrial area that you cannot recognize it anymore because they've completely Taken the industry out and now it's a really nice and quite central area So what was their concept? It was Creating these coal warehouses train warehouses into a really beautiful space Church-like space is what they wanted with a dome in the middle So of course they had to iterate a lot to get to that concept and here some of the Models that they did and it's quite interesting because you have the concept right their concept was to have a dome in the Middle, but the design solutions to get to that dome could be very different, right? So these all satisfied the design criteria, but they chose one and I think they chose the right one and It to iterative process doesn't stop it continues throughout the design process until we get to the final solution. So Cold drops the art make sure you check it out If you go to London and that process is very important to all of the architectural projects This is another one. This is by Zaka Hadid architects and it's in Saudi Arabia in Riyadh So the first image that you see on top. That's their winning competition entry, which okay? It looks great, but look where they got to with all the iterations, right? And it's actually almost built right so it's really fantastic So is that what we call beautiful functionality? I guess yes, and it's this beautiful functionality though Well kind of a but not really right so these are images that I've done which you're like for pavilion But therefore a workshop that I did with some university students a couple of years back And so what how does it how do you separate one from the other right because this does look beautiful? It is a pavilion, but it doesn't have like the programmatic requirements So specific criteria that we're trying to generate to meet that So it's not quite that even though it is quite beautiful. So let's get back to this project that you saw in the beginning So this is all designed with blender, right? So I was a project designer for this project Which is not too far from the metro station that I showed you it's in Saudi Arabia as well and And So how do you get to this? How do you design something like that? Right because it's got a lot of things going on You see there's people moving. It's a landscape, but you also have some areas in there which are Retail spaces and restaurants spaces events spaces and you have to be able to move around from that So that's what I want to talk about is taking this design journey with me So first we start with like some simple diagrams to understand the context We have to understand the proximity how we move to there How do we go around and then because we're designing an event space? We have to understand what kind of events are happening there And that's something that we all designed within our group I was the project designer for this project by the way, and so we have to map that out, right? But this is not quite designed it But we really need to understand the spatial parameters the programmatic elements that go in there to generate this kind of Criteria so we knew we wanted an event space We have to test what kinds of sizes work and what we can fit in there And then we have to also think about how do we combine some of these elements together, right? So if you want to have smaller events, we can have like a scenario where we have like one really big event or bunch of really small events So this here this is not designed yet, right? This is just the criteria to get to the design and what's really fascinating is that these three options here They all they're the the actual design Proposals are quite different, but they all satisfy that criteria that you show so before that Right, so we this is just a fraction of the design proposals that we did for the criteria that you saw And they're all quite different they start out with sketches, right? And this is where blender comes in So this was designed with blender and I can't remember now because this was about four years back now and Where we design I probably had two hours to start with this and Eventually, you know, we go back and we refine and so on. So how do you do this in blender? so However, you can basically right so you find like whatever works for you for the project and what's fascinating about blender Is the fact that we can be quite procedural about it. So in this case, it's not very complicated, right? So we have like Two sides that were modeled and then we have like a bridge behind it This one was a bit more complicated, but again, it starts out quite simple and straightforward So you create one hexagon hexagon, right? So then you create an array in one direction create a rain the other direction you flood it So it fits the whole site then you use the lattice modifier to deform it So it kind of grows because you can see we have our bridge which is part of our landscape because it's probably the widest bridge in the world It's it's quite large and then we have to break it down So this was done before geometry of notes four years ago, right? So if I were to do it now because I had to manually start to break it and sort of create like those steps that you see moving around Probably could have used the tractors to do that with within geometry notes And this is the scheme that we settled on not with those crazy hats right because they're a bit nuts But the idea was to kind of take it down and have like this dune like experience Which is more smooth so you sort of flow up the landscape and within there We already as I was designing this we had some specific zones that we were trying to map So there's an event space as you can see restaurant areas and those all had to be designed within the actual landscape And how was this is designed? So this is the first iteration with some kind of awkward canopies You know copy and paste and that's the more final iteration where you really feel how the bridge You know you have this sort of grit which trips right and then the bridge is almost like Flows into the space right and it starts to create this really beautiful pattern and You probably guessed by now how this is done, right? So you start with a straight grid and then you get you create some lattices to move around and then there's some pieces That they're kind of add-on in a quite separate way So I'll show you a snapshot of the model in a little bit So within here we have to satisfy all the design criteria that you saw before And that's the importance of design right? We're not just creating 3d for the sake of 3d. We're creating 3d with the idea that we really understand how this is going to impact our architecture our design Once we're done with the basic design we never done right? I mean we never done we can go on and on and on but within here We have to go back and now look this is just one example of the event space And we want to make sure that the event space works with all the kinds of scenarios that you saw before and beyond but Thinking about it more diagrammatically. So that's a very important step Sometimes we do it as you see here in diagram form. Sometimes we do it in 3d with concepts with just putting it everything So we have a better understanding and that's how the project starts to look like right? So we have like in this case It looks not so much as a landscape But quite urban just because of the angle that this image was taken from this is not Blender by the way, we hired a External architectural visualization company called mess room to do these but I'll show you the ones that I have done with Blender also So in here you kind of get like this excitement I think between these two levels and once you see it from different angles Then it does start to look more landscape like And a funny story here is you see the buildings over there. So those buildings Somebody and this happens a lot right in architecture offices We had an idea that we're gonna put some hotels It's a hotel, but it was just some blocks because there was no architect for it So we go how about we design something we show it to the client and maybe they'll like it and they'll hire us to Do that design as well So it's something that was modded in maybe like one hour two hours max to be able to do this So there's always this, you know, okay We go and we have to design a lot But then sometimes we we have these like a really really limited times to be able to design and again That's where Blender is is quite important in that design process So that's the snapshot of the model at this point I had worked on it for quite a while So it's not that procedural and a bit hacky, right? You can probably notice some parts don't flow quite well into it, but that's not the important part We don't want to have the absolute perfect apology in the perfect model at all times We want to do whatever we need to do in whichever way to get to the right design solution as quickly as Possible and sometimes that requires hacks, right? So sometimes, you know, you have to put things on top Sometimes you use bullions to move things around you do whatever it is But you try to keep it I try to keep it at least as procedural as possible for as long as possible So we can get you know, if we need to move around because we move things around quite a bit easier That's the the wall at my old architecture office with all the information of what it takes to and Actually, it's just a part of it You know for you know diagrams references, you can see where it says one two three four These were like some of the options that you see so in a way Software doesn't matter But it does I didn't talk so much about software when I was showing you the design solution But it does help because we can iterate faster and hopefully not always but hopefully More iterations equal better design Now I did want to show you here like another super cool project that I use blender for architecture design for which is meant And on it don't tell that to anybody the tallest tower in the world But I can't mention that maybe in ten years time when it gets built But it's not going to be our concept that gets built somebody else's because they had to restart the competition, but Big NDAs and so on anyways, I was showing another pretty cool project. So this is a Mixed to use development. This is in Lagos in Nigeria. These were also rendered with blender I just do them on the site whenever I can But I really focus more on design, but you know being able to present your work is very important as well So in this project, we've got hotels. We have office We have residential and the two towers one is called Cerulean the other one is in Digo They have different characters one one is more exquisite. Let's say more refined and the other one is strong both and grounded and The design is between Rhino and Revit and these are the programs that most architects tend to use but the facade on the Cerulean one was designed with the help of blender and when we design facades We also have to have specific criteria. So how much openings do we need? How much of the extrude? What do we do with the ants and we always use some references when we do that? We also have to consider the different kinds of zones for example a residential facade Looks a little bit different than an office facade You have terraces Whereas in office you don't have terraces and then we have some public spaces that should probably have a slightly different character as well So this is again just a fraction of the tests that we need to do to get to a good facade solution All done with the help of blender, of course with the little bands, you know, do they go Thick and white or you know, are they convex or cave concave? Are they flat? but at some point we decided to try having those bands but also connecting them vertically and This in blend this was generated in blender, right? We have a small chunk with sub diff then we use the array modifier and then the mirror modifier We always have to make sure within architecture that what we design for the most part Although, you know my designs even though they're all buildable from what you saw at the moment We still have to have a sanity check, right? Like so, how can we penalize this? How do we unitize it in order to make it work? and the building is currently in construction, right and Not just another render to see what it's going to Start looking like and this is how the facade was really built in blender, right? So we start with one component then it's mirrored Then we use one array in one direction then a second array in another direction Then a lattice modifier to deform the two longer sites because it starts all looking exactly the same And then the curve modifier to put it onto the footprint to deform it around the footprint And then another lattice because some of the levels have different Heights onto it and then Boolean because I needed to remove some parts on top of it so super simple in a way, right and You guys know this because we use blender But if you had to do this Somewhere else and have such a flexible setup that I need to just go in there and try to move things around That would be extremely difficult and time-consuming so blender is probably one of the best design tools for this kind of work and so faster iterations Hopefully again for the most part equal more beautiful and sensible design and So we really have to embrace like technology and I you know some people are kind of afraid of technology Probably nobody here, right? We're all yes blender You know nobody uses it in you know my studio my office whatever I'm going to learn it So I feel like this group here. We all really do embrace technology But you know in the wider world out there people don't embrace technology Perhaps in the same manner and I think it's really important to play with things and to understand how we can create things Even if it's not directly related to a project because at some point it could end up as a project So let me speak a little bit more about that so we've got one Aspect so this is a module that repeats basically and this is the with the t-shirt on by the way Which you saw the wonderful presentation before So it's completely modular and completely parametric. So if we were to take this a step further We have something like this, which is actually a course that I've done you can check it out I'll show you the links later in case anybody's interested to do that So that's actually one kind of iteration right for the course to get to something that I can teach him for hours But to get to that point there was also iteration So I had to design this three times actually my wife has this golden rule She said I tell her it's gonna take me one hour and she says so I'm gonna see you in three hours You know so that's the cause so anytime I try to do something it usually takes me three hours to do it All right, so this is a some kind of like a quite interesting water pavilion and the way it's modeled again. It's completely Procedural or parametric is the word we like to use in architecture essentially procedural So it's one chunk that's modeled then it's mirrored and then I'm using a polar array with an empty So basically an array with an empty to create a polar array to fix that to to sort of have the all the different elements connected So fairly simple procedural setup and then as I showed you before I Had to go back and sort of simplify this so I can teach it in a for our workshop to people that have never used Blender before So what about smaller scale can you use that and I think the iterative design process Criteria driven design process is the same no matter which scale you're working. No, you could be working Even a character I suppose right you can be working on a setting on a movie your movie set. You always we always have to refine So this is a house that I designed and sometimes I don't know if it ever happens to you But I had this project sitting around. That's what it looked like. It's beautiful. It's it's actually the s house Which is designed again. Well, it's just subject I guess in this point and a mirror modifier, but then as I was browsing the internet Instagram as a Horrible who'd invented social media? I don't know but I guess he has its uses as well, right? And at some point I just see a picture and I'm like wow This would be absolutely perfect to go in there, but this took at least three times to rebuild as well. Oh So at one point, you know, I was feeling a little bit down and I decided and as any architect probably Thought about at some point is I want to design my own house. Maybe we'll get built Maybe you want but I want to design it. So this took probably 10 iterations starting from scratch to get to a level where I was actually, you know comfortable and I said, okay now this Finally works. I didn't include too much information with you can check it out on my website But basically it's based around the golden ratio. So all the plans all the spaces they're proportional to to one another and I spend a lot of time on the interiors in here as well to make it work so it's actually I think it's important to show you that because The iterative design process is for all design projects You don't have to have organic geometry to do that sub div based geometry to do it and the interiors were a A combination of retro futurism with some curves along with Japanese architecture, which I'm a big fan of having, you know beautiful Timber slats with light passing through them. So again for great design actually Software does matter as long as your head is full with good ideas And embracing the design. So how do we do that? So we we have to keep An eye out outside of design and just start to play with manipulating form and being able to Design and work with different formal elements. I always have an architects mind So even when I'm doing these massings, I'm thinking how can they actually be turning to architecture? How do I put floors in there? What could the facade look like? But most of the time is just experimented with different workflows So most of these were done with the tissue add-on with which are just basic Desolations so everything is kept fairly parametric, right? so we can really manipulate the form as much as we want and You know some of these were done for various different workshops or just for fun to experiment with how we can provide this kind of Formal Experiments that could potentially like I see I mean probably don't but I see them as the possibility of creating buildings with those And if you learn enough of like those little techniques, you can sort of combine them To start to create some Beautiful massing in this case. I do call it only a massing still It's not an architectural project because I don't have a criteria to say I need so and so many square meters of this kind of space in there But you can imagine now right this could really easily turn into that and all of these by the way this I have a on YouTube a Video that's showing you exactly how to do this step by step in case you're interested again It's all parametric and then with the tissue add-on, but it's got a slightly tricky team that the panels in this case have to be On a diagonal, so they have to be designed to be as a diagonal into there. So it's really Important for me to keep experimenting even outside of projects So when a project does come I feel better equipped to be able to show how that can be actually made And then going back to where we started which was the urban realm You know Amsterdam absolutely beautiful city by the way isn't it because it works so well Architecturally you feel out on the street. It's quiet. It doesn't have cars. We have like really nice walls. This is a bit different Right again. I'm more of an architect than an architectural visualizer So when I do my visualizations, I'm a little bit lazy So it takes a lot of effort to put this with In an environment in an urban environment. So that's why I put it in the water, right? But this was designed for another course It's more the curved building that you see on those which images it on that image over there But I thought okay, so how do we? Sort of push what I can do with blender to start to show like the whole context almost in real time This is rendered with cycles, but it can be you know I can manipulate it very quickly because it's quite lightweight and that form. It's actually fairly simply built, you know, it's a Subdiff again, I guess my workflow at this point is a little bit similar I design a chunk I mirror it and then I rotate it, you know, whether with the ray I think this this time it was with geometry nodes and then it's using the simple deform modifier to twist it the floors there one plane a rate then using the Boolean modifier and then Extruding down to add a little bit of depth And some of the other twisted buildings that you see in this image over here. They were done with Tissue add-on as well. You have a base mass and then you use the tissue add-on so but in here what's important is that blender gives us like this not only a place to design but also place to See what we're designing and put it in a context put people put trees put all the aspects that give you a sense of scale So you understand how you would imagine the space to be There's some more images of that and Yeah, so my passion is really about showing architects and designers how to Think about at least to think about how to use blender So I teach a summer course as well to university students where It's a bit dictatorial, but they must use blender So in my course, you know in my unit they have to use blender and it is a challenge You know, so these are maybe third or fourth here university students that never used blender before because I'm not only teaching them How to model but I'm also teaching them how to think like architects, right? So similar to the design criteria you saw for the landscape project before Something like that has to occur over here as well And on top of that learn how to model that in blender So there's always a little bit of struggle, but I think the results are fairly nice and I continue with that So, yeah, that's about it So you can check out my projects at UH studio comm And I try to collaborate with people as well I'm actually quite interested in movies and seeing like maybe some of these in like a scene or something And I have a YouTube channel as well, which you can check out where oh, yeah That's the video that I was talking about with a tessellated diagram it where you can do it and also some courses People always ask me whether I use geometry notes, which I didn't talk too much about here But I actually have like this target building forms is Exactly taking like little massings and then understanding how with either with modifiers or with geometry notes We can turn these into architectural concepts really quickly so thank you so much and thank you to blender and To everybody else that's here