WINNER OF A 2024 CANADIAN ARCHITECT AWARD OF EXCELLENCEThe need for supportive housing is at a crisis point across Canada. 11 Brock Avenue not only addresses this need, but does so in a way that understands the effects of good design and the critical need for a baseline of net-zero and low carbon in building construction. This project prioritizes community through the design of an interior single-loaded corridor that promotes access to light and views to the communal spaces along the courtyard. The street faade expresses the rigour of mass timber construction, while still being playful and achieving a balance between opaque and transparent surfaces. Matthew Hickey, jurorThe design aims to create a distinct, yet contextually sensitive addition to the Parkdale neighbourhood. The ground-level landscape includes native shrubs and trees, and hardscaped areas for seating and bicycle parking.LOCATION Toronto, Ontario11 Brock Avenue is one of five projects resulting from a City of Toronto partnership with the Federal Government to create urgently needed supportive and affordable housing under the Rapid Housing Initiative. Targeting housing-ready sites, the initiative funds projects that are fast-tracked from project start to occupancy within 18 months.Located in Torontos central-west Parkdale neighbourhood, 11 Brock Avenue will provide 42 new supportive and rent-geared-to-income residential units on a corner lot that has been vacant for years. The buildings fine-grained, four-storey Brock Avenue faade is vertically divided into six bands, and animated by a couple of curves reminiscent of an old rolltop desk. One band demarcates the main entry by rolling inward above it; an adjacent band unrolls above the ground at bench height, creating an informal seating platform. Along the buildings west and north facades, its landscaped border amps up visual interest by oscillating in plan between planting beds and hardscaped areas for seating and bicycle parking.The tiered courtyard adjoins support spaces and common uses on the ground floor, and above, is wrapped with single-loaded corridors to the apartments.Several other congenial ideas coalesce in and around the buildings tiered, south-facing courtyard. At grade, the buildings dining hall and lounge, lobby corridor, and staff spaces all face onto a compact courtyard patio, providing the eyes on the street that help make this secluded space feel like a safe, sociable hub. The laundry room, conceived here as a social space rather than a purely utilitarian one, also has a courtyard view. A series of outdoor areas cascade down towards the ground-floor patio: the topmost tier is a garden terrace, with picnic tables and raised accessible community-garden planting beds. Single-loaded corridors wrap the outdoor space on three sides, and include large window-boxes with seating, so that residents can sit by a window with views to the shared social area.Screenshot11 Brock Avenue is an all-electric, mass timber building, designed to meet net zero and low embodied carbon requirements. A wide band of extensive green roof aids in retaining stormwater and promotes biodiversity; the roof has also been designed to support a planned, future photovoltaics installation.The layout of the residential units is optimized for simplicity and efficiency, and ensures privacy by not having any units face each other. Using a regular grid layout and repeating stacked suites improves the efficiency of the design and the speed of construction. More than 30 percent of the homes this project provides are accessible suites.CLIENT Govan Brown and Associates Ltd., City of Toronto | ARCHITECT TEAM Aaron Budd (MRAIC), Sam Dufaux, Joseph Khan, Hayley Imerman (MRAIC), Hugo Flammin, Jessica Daga, Evan Wakelin, Aziza Asat, Jina Lee, Luke Kairys, Valerie Hough, Bonnie Chuong, Hillary Eppel, Huy Pham | TRANSPORTATION BA Consulting Group | AREA 1,055 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | STATUS Under construction | ANTICIPATED COMPLETION 2025As appeared in the December 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazineSee all the 2024 Awards of Excellence winnersYou can read ourjurys full comments here.The post 11 Brock appeared first on Canadian Architect.

How I made this AAA Cinematic in Unreal Engine 5This is a high-level breakdown of my process for creating this game teaser/cinematic. I used Move.Ai for the motion capture, and Metahuman Animator for the face capture.https://adapt.one/editorial/link/268/How+I+made+this+AAA+Cinematic+in+Unreal+Engine+5/

Skeleton Crew - ClipCheck out this clip from Skeleton Crew that released December 2nd.https://adapt.one/editorial/link/267/Skeleton+Crew+-+Clip/

The cinnamon teal (Spatula cyanoptera) is a species of dabbling duck found in western North and South America. It is a migratory species, travelling to northern South America and the Caribbean during the Northern Hemisphere's winter. The cinnamon teal lives in marshes and ponds, and feeds mostly on plants. It has a typical length of 16in (41cm), with a wing span of 22inch (56cm) and a mass of 14oz (400g). The male has bright reddish plumage with a duller brown coloration on the female. The bird feeds predominantly by dabbling, with its main diet being plants and sometimes molluscs and aquatic insects. This cinnamon teal was photographed at the Parrot World animal park in Crcy-la-Chapelle, France.Photograph credit: Clment BardotRecently featured: MangosteenThe Book of Fixed StarsAfrican helmeted turtleArchiveMore featured pictures

December 4: Navy Day in India2004 transit of Venus1639 Jeremiah Horrocks and William Crabtree made the first successful observation of a transit of Venus (example pictured) from Earth.1872 The American brigantine Mary Celeste was found apparently abandoned under circumstances that remain unknown.1971 Indo-Pakistani War: The Indian Navy launched a successful attack against the Pakistan Navy at Karachi, sinking three ships with no Indian casualties.1980 The English rock group Led Zeppelin officially disbanded.2006 Six black teenagers assaulted a white student in Jena, Louisiana; the subsequent court cases became a cause clbre for perceived racial injustice in the United States.Maerten de Vos (d.1603)Agnes Forbes Blackadder (b.1875)Inder Kumar Gujral (b.1919)Benjamin Britten (d.1976)More anniversaries: December 3December 4December 5ArchiveBy emailList of days of the yearAbout

html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"Reallusion has released iClone 8.52, the latest update to the real-time animation software.Despite the version number, its a major update, introducing AccuPose, a new AI-assisted character posing system, intended to streamline the process of blocking out animations. Other changes include support for non-destructive editing of motion clips, the option to display motion trails in the viewport, and three new animation curve filters.AI-assisted AccuPose system lets you pose characters by pulling on key body partsThe key change in iClone 8.52 is AccuPose, a new AI-assisted character posing system.Like the AutoPosing system in Cascadeur, it lets users pose 3D characters by manipulating a small number of body parts, with the software using AI to reposition of the rest of the body.It is intended to speed up the process of blocking out animations by enabling artists to establish natural-looking key poses more quickly, without having to pose each body part individually.Users can specify which parts of the body should be affected by the AI, or lock the characters hands and feet in place during posing, and can modify the poses using iClones existing tools.Changes made using AccuPose are stored on a dedicated timeline track within iClone.Core functionality available free: other poses require a paid subscriptionAccuPose is available via a separate plugin, available from the Reallusion Hub.Users get access to the core AccuPose functionality for free, which includes AI models for common poses, including standing, sitting, squatting, kneeling, lying down, crawling and rolling.Other types of poses, including those for combat, dance and action moves, require paid AccuPose Infinity subscriptions, which provide access to over 1,000 AI-trained poses.The AI models are trained on data from ActorCore, Reallusions online animation library.New motion trails system displays the trajectories of body parts in the viewportThere are also some other significant new features in iClone 8.52, including motion trails.Users can now display the paths traced over time by a characters joints as continuous trails in the viewport, with the positions of key frames displayed as markers on the trail.The workflow is shown in the demo video above: it doesnt seem to be possible to change the trajectory of the character by manipulating markers directly in the viewport, but clicking on a marker selects the corresponding key in the Curve Editor and Timeline for editing.Non-destructive clip editing and new Filter types for smoothing animation dataOther important changes include the option to edit motion clips non-destructively.The new non-destructive method makes it possible to crop a clip, then later recover the portions that were cut out without having to resample the clip to restore the missing keys.In addition, the Curve Editor gets three new filter types for manipulating animation data: Reinterpolation, Peak Removal and Butterworth Smoothing.The latter is often used to remove noise from motion-capture data, and is implemented in a range of other 3D applications, including Blender, Houdini, Maya and MotionBuilder.The update also improves the accuracy of finger motion imported in FBX format from Xsens mocap suits or the Mixamo library, and adds an extra alpha channel when rendering in EXR format.Price and system requirementsiClone 8.52 is compatible with Windows 7+. The update is free to existing users. New perpetual licenses of iClone have a standard price of $599.AccuPose Infinity subscriptions have a standard price of $99/year for individuals, and $39/month or $299/year for Workgroups, available via Reallusion Prime subscriptions.Read an overview of the new features in iClone 8.52 on Reallusions forumRead a full list of new features in iClone 8.52 in the online release notesHave your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we dont post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.

Why Do You Love Your Favorite Songs? | Scarlet Keys | TED

Why a banana sold for $6.2 millionPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min read13 hours ago-- This banana emoji is not for saleIssue #220: friends v. fans + the value of bad ideasMaybe youve heard about the banana duct-taped to a wall that just sold for $6.2 million last month. Its name is The Comedian and its creator, Maurizio Cattelan, has built a career around art pranks. One of his previous hits, from 1999, is a sculpture of Pope John Paul II being struck by a meteorite.The bananas new owner, Justin Sun a crypto exec received neither a banana nor duct tape. Instead, he got a digital certificate that gives him permission to tape a banana to a wall and call it The Comedian. The certificate contains instructions for how exactly to tape the banana to his wall, and how to replace it when it rots.Sun has a history of doing things like this: he once bid $4.6 million to have lunch with Warren Buffet (he won, but cancelled the lunch). Later, he bid $28 million to fly with Jeff Bezos into sub-orbital space on New Shepard. (He cancelled again! Sorry Jeff, scheduling conflict, cant go to space today.)I asked Christopher P Jones, an art historian who writes on Medium, for his take. Does all this not the banana itself, but the stories we tell about it constitute art? Jones rule for telling good art from bad art is to ask yourself whether its meaning converges on a set of possible options or broadens into a deeper set of possibilities. What youre looking for are layers of meaning that continue to inspire new interpretations. Does a piece of art tell you what it wants you to think? If so, its not art its propaganda.Jones sees the duct-taped banana as continuing in a 100-year-old tradition of found art (everyday objects placed on pedestals) beginning with Marcel Duchamps 1917 Fountain and including Cattelans 2016 golden toilet. If the banana artwork is a reflexive comment on the commodification of art, Jones told me via email, which I think is its purpose, then the absurdity and therefore eloquence multiplies with every sale, peel, bite, and news headline that reports on it.Im curious what you think. Is this art or just PR? Something in between? Harris Sockel Good quotesIf your beliefs are never challenged by your community, I have news for you: you dont have friends, you have fans. (Sochima M.)A follow-up to our issue about Bluesky, via one writer who became so addicted to Twitter he noticed himself developing a voice and persona specifically geared toward the platforms dynamics: Nobody has yet produced a successful alternative to Twitter because the things that people like about it are so hard to extricate from the things they dont. The thrill of Twitter is the thrill of scale. (Janis Hopkins)Protect the ever-loving heck out of your ability to do dont let big ideas get in the way of that. (Avi Siegel) Your daily dose of practical wisdomEven if you think an idea is bad, write it down. The more deeply you understand why an idea doesnt work, the more likely youll come up with a good one next. (Chris Ferrie)

Learn how to create a game with a free online Unreal Fellowship: Games course, available for a limited time between December 2 and January 15. Explore over 35 hours of expert-led content, previously shown on an invite-only basis.

What can be done with Geometry Scripts? I guess the answer is: The most boring Game ever.