Not that simple

My task for the day included creating 3D models of a display case that I could recolor according to areas in the museum.

Hoo boy.

That is not as easy as it bloody sounds.

Especially when you consider that our display cases are all different sizes. And the sizes make no sense.

Take the one that is 2' 9 3/4" square.

I tried measuring it in metric, but it's obviously supposed to be in english units because those are marginally neater. It isn't compensating for the edge bevel so the plexi was easier to cut--the edge bevel is .75". What maniac made this? It's 2'7.75" tall. Why?! why?! Did somebody have a really slapdash ruler? How do? And why aren't any of them identical? They don't look like something we could have made here, so they were obviously meant to be manufactured this way.

I...

I don't understand.

Display Case D--we have A-H. I'm only using letters because one was labeled E and another F.

I'm thinking of modeling all of them out of spite, since I spent all morning trying to get the plugin that lets me make rounded edges work. Also so I can be damn sure that nobody else at PARI can recreate these things without considerable headache. Again. Out of spite for SketchUp. 

More Coherent Reflection

By "More Coherent", I mean "Extremely Long But With Pictures". Just a warning.

First: I finally learned what the heck people say when they want a storyboard of a museum gallery...or, at least, I saw an example. Asking anyone to make something based on the name of the thing you want--which has several different connotations depending on context--is perhaps a little unfair. Or, at least, unhelpful, since they don't know what you want.

The purpose isn't the same as for a movie or comic book storyboard, where most shots are basically set in stone by virtue of being drawn. A 3D space doesn't work like a movie, so that makes sense. However, this was the only context in which I had heard the term:

Storyboard from Spiderman 2

And I was concerned. Because that's hella complicated and a heck of a lot of drawing. I do not have practice drawing stuff that well, that fast, and I know from experience that a well-done inked comic-type-thing can take a week if you're working on other stuff...for like 8 panels.

Problem? Problem.

What I saw at the Space and Rocket center was much easier, and the kind of thing I could probably finish today if I didn't have to write this up, write some other stuff up, attend two meetings, and give a presentation on poster design to some Duke TIP kids... Basically, it was a map of where in the room things are likely to be, similar to this one I made last week: 

Followed by each exhibit in the sequence it's likely to be visited. Each exhibit would have a powerpoint slide--in the one I saw at USSRC, and he did acknowledge that some people prefer Word or whatever--with a list of artefacts that would be a part of the exhibit, graphics required, interactive experiences, that kind of thing. 

Reflection on the Space and Rocket Center

If you're in on this pokemon craze--or Ingress--spend a day at the rocket center. You won't regret it.

Now that that's out of the way.

I finally learned what the heck Steve wanted when he said he wanted a storyboard, because the man I talked to showed me an example of one he made earlier this week. He also gave me some useful tips for placating The People In Charge--come up with several options for things like color schemes was an easy one.

He was amused to learn that we were the ones who got the ATS-6 satellite, because they wanted it too. We had a better claim; our facility developed and talked to the thing, whereas they wanted to use it to tell the story of Von Braun since he also developed it. They're going to have to fabricate a model. He also suggested having our curator reach out to them if we want to borrow anything from their archives. Since we're the closest space science center, it's ludicrous that we don't have some kind of relationship with their facility; I'm going to push the notion of forming one. Hard. 

We also discussed the importance of telling a story in exhibit galleries and how even subtle things like varying colour choices can make distinctions within a single room. Also, some tips for graphics: Have them wrapped on the edges unless the edges are effectively framed, or people tend to destroy things. I also took special note of something I've seen in quite a few museums: It's possible to compose a museum with relatively few artefacts (chosen to highlight important points) if the graphics are very well done, interesting, and informative. The timeline from 1950-1955 or so in the Davidson center is like that.

I was gratified to learn that SketchUp, while possibly not any kind of industry standard, is the modelling software of choice at the USSRC. So I'm learning the  a right software for this field, at any rate, not just shoehorning some software into an application its badly suited for.

I have a few more notes and some photos, but I'm tired. So I'll write something more coherent on Monday.

Yawn.

Lightning and the Rock Gallery

Something I should probably note: Sometimes my posts are kind of short, grouchy, or generally stressed. Or I feel like I said basically the same things I said the previous day. In those cases, I don't intend to share them to Facebook because I don't think anyone would be particularly interested in a post mostly dominated by gifs of that guy from El Dorado banging his head on the wall.

ICYMI, then, I need to home the 1/3? scale Lunar Module. I'm inclined to do so in place of a dinosaur, since the story of why the moon looks like Swiss Cheese is nearly as interesting as Falling Space Rock Killed All Teh Dinosaurs. We also have some stuff little kids might like in terms of interactivity, according to Christy, and a slew of 3D printed moon craters. A fake lunar landscape could also be a thing, if you're handy with papier maché, thus lofting our little lunar lander to a more visible height. (If they need a volunteer to make a fake moon, that sounds kind of fun, frankly. Paper mache and chicken wire, cover the whole thing with a thin slurry of plaster of paris, spray paint it dark gray, dry brush it in cheap white and light gray acrylic? It'd take me a few days, but I could totally do that. Stick the whole thing on a low table, exact size depending on the scale of the lander, surround it with a plexiglass barrier? Relatively professional looking with a minimum of cost, especially if we can find some old newspapers. Or possibly chicken wire. I wouldn't be surprised.)

Imagine, if you will, something like this. With different signage.
Do I need to model some kind of generic signpost? Um... maybe.
I did model the display the lander is sitting on.

We also have another satellite, but that ain't my problem because it's too big to fit in the room and everybody knows it. Something about giant solar panels and a satellite loosely the size of two minifridges taped together along their biggest faces. They're inclined to save it for now.

Phew.

El Dorado usually says it best.

Steve did want labels, so I'm slapping up these awful red and yellow signs. I don't think I'm going to bother making my own model, because these aren't actually going to be part of the gallery. That seems a wee bit much, and I don't actually know how to model stuff on angles. (That wasn't part of the tutorial series.) It gets the point across. Just imagine the gallery without the obnoxious signs...or, at the very least, with more informative signs that don't block walking paths and conform to ADA standards.

Because these could totally fit if we took out the most boring rocks (like the well samples... <_<)
It wouldn't take *that* much rearranging. Probably. 

Also I learned how to import custom textures, which is why the walls and carpet look a little different than in the first image. Want bright pink carpet? I can do that instead of gold. A nice dark wooden display? Oh yeah. That weird stucco wall texture, you know the one, from every dentist office ever? Done and done. (I'm getting pretty good at this program.)

I have also learned that my job could be weirder. Somebody--presumably as a hobby, hopefully as a hobby--3D scanned a rock.

Why? 

...a good question indeed. Ask us another. 

We have a meteor about this size. I'd like to raise it up to loosely waist level.
It's heavy, though, so it's going to take maybe two people to do that.
Possibly three.
Depends on the people.

Now, if you've visited PARI, you'll also know that we have a metric ton of rocks. 

I don't think I'm exaggerating by weight.

Most of them are dead boring and/or quartz. We have a representative sample of North Carolina rocks--which are mostly quartz. I like quartz, it's pretty, don't get me wrong! But, for crying out loud, it's dead boring to see a rock museum that's 45% amethyst and quartz. Nor am I interested in polished well samples...which we also have on display. Somebody was digging a well, dug up a pretty rock, polished it into a cabochen, and it's on display at PARI for some mystery reason. 

Why? 

I don't know. We don't need that much random rock crap on display when we can focus on the cool stuff--rubies, sapphires, garnets, emeralds, uraninite, and our other really shiny rocks--and devote the rest of the room to meteors and the lunar module. Hence this label for the remainder of the room:

"The Most Interesting Rocks"

Perhaps it's a little passive aggressive. I'll downplay it when I show this off tomorrow, and point out that some rocks are more inherently interesting to the general public than others, and they all need better labels. Because people do like the shinies, they just would like them better if they were shown off to their best advantage.

So that's another gallery more or less arranged, to be shown to Steve and, possibly, Don Cline tomorrow afternoon on the big screen in the meeting room (if the projector and my computer will play nice.) 

Oh dear. And the lightning meter just made the bad sound (a-WOO-ga!). 

14:33, 13/7/16

If you want to see our lightning for yourself, by the by, this picture should update to whatever time in the future you choose to have a look:

The number in the upper left indicates flashes-per-minute and the red box means "Use caution when going outside and don't stand on a ridge like a lightning rod ya genius". If you don't see the red box, and see a yellow box around the image instead, that means "Storm leaving or incoming; be prepared for changes" and no box means we're fine and there isn't any lightning.

The whole thing works by strapping a pair of radio antennae to the top of the ridge at 90º angles to each other, so they can extrapolate where the lightning is. Lightning bolts release low frequency radio waves, which the antennae detect. The brighter the box on the screen, the more recent the flash. 

If the meter turns red like this, we shut down all the telescopes because while we can't prevent them from getting struck, we can prevent the lightning from frying the instruments on them. 

Minion Gifs are Always Good

That was the sky last night at 9:00 or so, when it stopped raining (well, storming) and I went to go retrieve my blanket and pillowcase from the dryer. There was light enough to see by--it was only civil twilight--but the rest of the landscape was too dark for my camera. This is looking west, over building 4.

Gee, do you think the storm was moving east? A little? Smiley the Happy Telescope was actually struck by lightning, we're pretty sure. He's fine--well, as fine as he was before he got struck by lightning--and a few things needed to be reset, but it was one helluva boom. The power flickered, radios briefly spit static, that kind of thing. A helluva boom. I couldn't get the lightning detector to load, so I asked my friends to keep tabs on it so they could tell me when I was relatively unlikely to get zapped for going outside. Thanks, guys. I like being un-fried. Bzzt.

I don't know how Colleen is doing. I'll try to check on her in a little while, but she didn't come in today. She's still resting, I think, so my exile to building 4 continues (it's fine, totally comfortable, mildly electrifying) until she's feeling better. She did get some dinner last night, and I helped deliver vast quantities of ginger ale and bananas, which she thought sounded edible.


As for the interior design, it's largely OK except for one fairly major error...

I forgot the LEM.

Mostly because I couldn't--and still kind of can't--figure out where the hell we should put a 1/4 or 1/3 (I can't remember) scale lunar module.

But we have it, and Steve wants it on display.

Awesome.

So I have until Thursday to figure out where the heck that thing belongs.

Cool beans. Coooooool beans.

Maybe we can make the crater room centred on Any Lunar Crater Ever, instead of the Chicxulub Impactor and dinosaurs. We do technically have 3D printed craters, after all. And moon rocks. Christy had some walk-on-the-moon type stuff that kids apparently like. Sure, this could work.

This totally isn't my expression staring at my model. Nope. Tooootally not.

I also need to make a study of how the space and rocket center does it. Our problem is that we have mostly space shuttle stuff, with a bare sprinkling of everything else (like Apollo Soyuz). The Space and Rocket center has, let's be fair, mostly Apollo and early space history stuff with a smattering of the more modern.

So how the heck did they incorporate it?

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure they sort of stuck it in a corner. But they have practice with this stuff. Maybe somebody on their staff will have some idea about how to make their Davidson Centre flow better without sort of just sticking stuff in there? 

At least--apart from not including a lunar module--my model mostly looks good.  Steve wants a colour coded map of themed areas, which I could do by just printing it out and colouring it with crayons. (I think he would prefer photoshop, though.) The wall graphics weren't quite explicit enough.

I also learned that we have another satellite, but because it has massive solar panels (think "room length") still attached, I don't have to deal with it. 

Phew.

Modelling the "Dream Museum"

I put dream museum in quotes because while the PARI museum is, I suppose, my baby, I haven't decided whether or not I want to drown that baby in a bathtub. 

It's deeply surreal to have an accurate model of the museum's floor plan and to play around with it in the virtual world of SketchUp--especially when I then walk through the museum as is and get a sort of mental overlay of what I'm envisioning. I can see why designers use 3D modelling in the real world. 

Today, I have gotten the space room at least passably complete and begun to work on the impact room (with the meteorites). I also modelled the third room and have decided that it gets the proud distinction of housing general earth science--like the sandbox, for example. I figured out how to import graphics (from photos, say) into sketchup as well as how to resize things.

I gave up on putting a dinosaur in the impact room. The room is too small to fit anything more than the dust of a completely crushed tyrannosaurus skeleton, and who cares about that? It could probably hold a triceratops, if the tail was curved around, or definitely something fairly small like a deinonychus, velociraptor, archaeopteryx, microraptor, you get the idea. For now, I'm modelling it without--mostly because nobody has contributed a scale-accurate version of a triceratops to the SketchUp library. Skeletal or otherwise. 

This is not the entire room. This is the wall on one's left when one enters from the space room.

As far as the space room goes, I established where the satellite theme, space shuttle theme, and historical themes can go by the virtue of a partial wall (not presently in the room) dividing it into a sort of U shape. 

This is a view from the door. You can see the corner of a big STADAN station map on the left wall--which is the partial wall I mentioned--and the timeline on the right, as well as the fridge standing in as a size double for the ATS-6 satellite in front of a graphic of satellite orbits on the back wall. There's also a television, which is presently installed in approximately that location, which can play the ATS-6 documentary in full, if we so choose, or an edited portion. Or, of course, films about satellites in general. You can also see a sofa by the STADAN map, which curves in sort of a question mark to take advantage of the view outside--which is not, of course, included in this 3D model.

Here, of course, we have the Space Shuttle area. I have two of the screens presently on the wall included here, which can display space shuttle launch and landing videos--they're on NASA's website, about 8-10 minutes long for the good bits, and the most interesting bits are shown on the wall graphics. On the opposite side of the partial wall is a space shuttle model (we don't have one, I'm being fanciful), an interactive landing simulator (well, a computer set up to run the free Orbiter software--there's a new version coming out this year and it's free, unlike X-plane, and can do a decent landing simulator on a bog standard desktop computer. We could rig something with the controls), and the STS-121 tire. There's also a graphic you can't see from this angle of STS-121 landing. I'm not saying we have to include all these graphics; I'm including them mostly so that it's obvious what each area is. However, I would like to include these graphics.

There are also wall mounted display cases for smaller items in my sketches--things like the tiles on reentry, the laptops with the waving astronaut, that sort of thing. I also haven't finished the far corner by the exit, where you can just see a smallish brown display case. 

I'm torn about the third room. I got into the library, counted the tiles, and modelled its bare bones floorplan, mostly. (There's a far door I didn't include that I might need to go back in for, that kind of thing.) But what to go in there? I'm thinking a combination of the leftover rocks and citizen science. We can set computers up with our stuff in the control room (or duplicates of it, anyway), The Sandbox, and maybe some of the Zooniverse projects. The rocks can go into a rock cycle or gems of North Carolina exhibit. Or both, but it isn't *that* big a room. 

Hm. I'll work on it some more tomorrow morning. 

An update on something more quality-of-life related:

Unfortunately, Colleen--my roommate--is sick. With...something. We aren't sure what, but it's bad enough that she's been effectively quarantined, and I need to go get some of my stuff and take up a temporary residence in Building 4 with the guy interns. I also need to throw my pillowcase and blanket in the washing machine, just in case she's contagious. Hopefully it's food poisoning. If it's food poisoning, she'll be better sooner rather than later. At least I took my laundry home over the weekend so I have about a week's worth of clothing in my car--I only need to grab some stuff like my sneakers and maybe a t-shirt or two apart from aforementioned pillow/blanket. 

PARI is also a Pokemon Go! hotspot, just fyi. As well as Ingress. We had a Pokemon Go beta tester here and I learned a new way to summon Tim the Coding Guru. Just use "Tim" and "Pokemon" in the same sentence. He pops right up. It was a little scary, actually--not because he's super into pokemon or anything, he wasn't quite in the right generation, but because of the sheer rapidity with which he appeared. From several rooms away. He's also been attacking my Ingress resonators, although he doesn't know they're mine--bit sad, really, since all I can do is keep throwing them down and using them to try to level up. Ah well. 

Le sigh.

A rare instance where 3D might be easier.

I've taken a whole class in 3D modelling--it's kind of a useless class, because I learned a program that, ahem, isn't available for mac.

But Google SketchUp is. And, as a bonus, it has a library of things like the display cases in the image above--I modeled the room, and imported the display cases from the gallery of things other people have created and shared with the world.

And I swear, this program is going to save me so much time.

Why? How the heck can a (slightly evil) program save me time in design?

Consider this: If I want to convey my ideas in a 2D manner, I have to guess at proportions (since I don't have any ISO paper), draft it all out by hand, ink it, color it, and then I'll have one copy susceptible to damage unless I devote another 10-30 minutes getting it into a computer at relatively high quality.

Yikes.

Whereas with this modeling program, I can get the proportions of the room right, I can place pre-made models of things "close enough!" to what I want to represent where I want things (like, for example...a fridge where I want to show that there's an ATS-6 Satellite, because nobody has modeled one of those. For some reason), I can drag and drop them all and my perspective is promised to be correct as are the spatial relations between objects, and life is made easier for everyone.