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Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

a book by Allan Brito

Blender 3D: Architecture, Buildings, and Scenery will be featured here at Archtopia for a while, and it describes the power of Blender 3D in Architectural Visualizations. You will see how to use the final models to create simpler scenes for use in 3D games, where real-time rendering is necessary. You will also see how to use them to create the sets for animated movies.

About Blender 3D

Blender 3D is a open-source 3D graphics suite, that is capable of modeling, rendering and animating 3D environments, and one of the best parts about it, is that you can download it for free at: http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/. Another cool thing about it is that the installed program it’s only 10 MB, and not only that,
but it can run on Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.

In Depth Review | SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization

a book by Robin de Jongh

This week you might have noticed a “Featured Book” section on our middle sidebar. Well the book is entitled SketchUp 7.1 for Architectural Visualization – Beginner’s Guide and is a detailed guide, that will literally take you by the hand and teach you how to make stunning photo-realistic and artistic visuals of your projects, with free software, and free resources that you can find all over the internet.

So let me start my review, because I can’t wait to tell you guys about the things you can learn through this book.

Building Construction Illustrated (Paperback)
~ Francis D. Ching (Author)

Building Construction Illustrated

Bought this book the other week, and fount it more than useful, so I thought I’d give it a review. I needed some information regarding residential construction, but what I found was so much more.

This Illustrated book is packed with almost everything you need to know about construction. When I say that, I mean it covers all of the major components. It does not walk you through tiling a floor, but as an example it does show the different methods of framing and provide clear illustration of how each method is done. I only wanted information on residential construction, but this book covers commercial building as well. The drawings are excellent. I found it tough to put the book down and found myself re-reading several sections because of all the information contained in them. It will serve as an excellent reference guide for all of my future projects. I have already changed many of the details for my upcoming project as a result of this book.

New ideas on how to design, build, and decorate a home are always of essential value to architects, designers, and homeowners alike. This book offers an extensive collection of apartments from all over the world, devised by distinguished international architects and designers who have worked to achieve practical, innovative, and stunning solutions adapted to the specific needs and particular tastes of their clients. This compilation expresses the diversity of current trends in apartment design and provides an inspirational source of ideas for those active in the field of design or interested in catching up on the latest in contemporary residential architecture.

The design of an apartment presents several challanges not imposed on the designer of a free-standing house. The most restricting is probably size, and second having to deal with walls that probably can’t be moved. Even more interesting or challenging is dealing with the confines of an older building that may have beams in strange places, or in one instance in this book a now abandoned water tank on the roof to be converted into a penthouse.