Biggest Little House Complete

3.22.17

Mason Himself House Expansion

DESN225 - Portfolio Preparation - Ivy Tech Community College Bloomington



The Biggest Little House Render is complete. My major tasks were as follows:

1. Measure existing house

2. Draw existing house 

3. Place existing house

4. Draw remodel

5. Render remodel in the 4 seasons from multiple Point-of-Views

I have completed these all to the assignments satisfaction. I had my children help me measure the dimensions of my house. I then drew my house in SketchUp. I placed my house, although after the fact, I am hot happy with the result. My property has far too many trees, and thus makes my landscape far too green. As mentioned above, I have children, and as anyone who has children knows, grass and children do not get along. Therefore, I have multiple 4-wheeler tracks wrapping around my property. I then remodeled my house. It was harder in some aspects than I thought it would be. I would be working on an aspect and then another aspect of the house would go awry.  When I took breaks, I watched videos on YouTube about SketchUp and different rendering programs. I found one called VRay that looked promising. I downloaded the program and tried it out. It did not meet my needs for this project, but looks like it would be useful elsewhere. I ended up having to finish my house on campus as my home computer isn't capable of the work that I was needing to do. I ended up rendering with ShaderLight. It took me awhile to figure out how to use the sunlight feature, but once I did it was smooth sailing from then on out. 

I have drawn my house with SketchUp, and then used it again to design my expansion. I tried using a new rendering program called VRay, but it wasn't up to my needs at this time, so I ended up using ShaderLight. I have produced 4 renderings from what I consider the 2 main angles of my house, two from the front and two from the back. Each render is during both a separate season and time. This show the multiple aspects of how my house would look throughout the year. 

Today at 5:00 pm

June 28th - my birthday at 6:30 am

September 1st at Dusk

Christmas at Noon

This project has taught me once again that I am a perfectionist and  that I do more than is typically needed. I drew the floorplan of the house even though it did not need to be drawn for this project. I had to stop with the floorplan drawing in order to get my actual project finished. I have discovered that trees in the warehouse are nowhere near as tall as I need and want them to be. The final days were rough as my home computer was not capable of this amount of work, but once I was on a computer that could, the rendering went smoother than I expected. 

YouTube - 

W Design Corp

SketchUp School

FPSArchitect

Architecture Inspirations

While this project is complete for class, I am not finished with it as a person. I will eventually floorplan out the upstairs and the renovations. I am not fond of the ground, so I will find something else to take it's place. Also, because I have so many trees, I will eventually do a much better job arranging all of my trees and shrubbery. But that is for another day. 

Biggest Little House Continued...

3.117

Mason Himself House Expansion

DESN225 - Portfolio Preparation - Ivy Tech Community College Bloomington

Finally, on a nice day, I had my kids help me get some measurements on the outside of the house. This primarily was them holding the end of the tape measure or holding my pad and pen. There were constant questions to be had as to why I was measuring our house and the answer "It is for a school project," didn't really seem to suffice.

I eventually sat down and started to use SketchUp and build my house.  I was well into building the house, having both floors and roof on, when I discovered that windows should "be windows" and therefore transparent.

Enter the Recycle bin.

Now that I have restarted, I have the exterior wall built, and children running throughout the house with a tape measure calling out what all and it's length. With this information, I have the first floor interior built so that the windows are not an opening into the abyss.

In the above photo, you can see why my house is the "Biggest Little House" as the top center room is the Kitchen.  As I enjoy cooking, this space is far too small to entirely enjoy myself.  The top right room is the Dining Room and is far too small for a house that is easily capable to hold a family of 5.   This is why I am planning on extending these back three rooms of my house by 10' to 12'.

In the above photo, you can see part of the interesting doorway from the living room into the dining room.  You can also barely see in the upstairs windows the windows on the East side of the house.

I still need to draw the roof and place the house in Google-scape.  Then the remodel can begin with the addition to the back rooms, the new deck that surrounds most of the house, and the new roof to cover the new deck.  

I expect that I will have the roof finished before the end of the week. This will give me a couple of weeks to build the deck and new roof and then work on rendering it into different seasons and possibly a night scene.

2.5.17

Mason Himself House Expansion

DESN225 - Portfolio Preparation - Ivy Tech Community College Bloomington

Project Overview - In 2014, my wife and I bought what we thought would be our dream house. It is semi-secluded, hidden in trees and has more bedrooms than we need. Unfortunately, our dream home is the "smallest big house we have ever seen." There just is not enough room for everything. 

Statement of Development - Eventually we plan to add-on to our house. I don't imagine many contractors around Linton use blueprints and renderings to complete their projects. Therefore, for this class, I am going to do a final render of what my house should look like in the end. I will use Sketchup and whatever other programs I need to complete this project. This will give me more rendering experience.

Detailed Product Description - I will have to measure the outside of the house. Then I will have to build the existing house on Sketchup. Next I will have to build in the remodel and render it. I will use Google Maps/Earth to place the house in order to get the seasonal lighting and shadows correct.

Major Tasks and Milestones - 

1. Measure existing house

2. Draw existing house 

3. Place existing house

4. Draw remodel

5. Render remodel in the 4 seasons from multiple Point-of-Views

Resource Requirements - Sketchup, Google, Google Maps, Google Earth

Sources - Google, YouTube