Now that this is out of the way I will be going through all the website call for helps tomorrow (Sunday) and checking that everyones website is working. I have not heard anything from Mike Donn but I am assuming marking will probably begin sometime next week. If I come across any issues with anyones website I will contact them via email and put a comment on their blog. 

1. Have you have copied your website onto the R-Drive?
2. Is the website in the correct directory? (the one with your name)
3. Is index.html at the very top of the folder structure (i.e. not buried three folders down)
4. Have you checked the site by going to:
   http://www.vuw.ac.nz/architecture-onlineteaching/courses/bbsc303/students/2006/(Lastname)_(Firstname)
   

If you answer yes to all of those questions then press the sync button on Reasonate. You will find it on your blog page next to the Edit and Tag This buttons. It looks like an arrow going around in a circle.

Once you have pressed the button a little message will tell you that the sync process has started. Reasonate will go to the location mentioned in step 4 and open the index.html file. Using this file as a reference it will copy across all the linked files and references, literally rebuilding your website on the Reasonate server. If all goes correctly you should have a carbon copy of your website on Reasonate. If something fails check this post for some answers, make a few changes and start the sync process again.

As you upload your files to the R-Drive and they get copied across to Reasonate you will in no doubt notice a few issues. Here are the main ones and how to fix them:

Hyperlinks that don’t work

If you find a hyperlink that does not work check that it is not pointing to a resource on one of your network drives (e.g. I://web/about.html).

Missing normal images

Likewise with missing images check that the image source is not pointing to a resource on a network drive. All images should use relative urls (i.e. images/example.jpg).

Missing rollover images

The Dreamweaver rollover technique seems to have been used a lot by people which is unfortunate. It is 10 years out of date and really unsightly with all that Javascript code. Because of all the Javascript the copy process from the VUW server to the Reasonate server does not ‘see’ the roll-over images and as a consequence it does not copy them across.

The easiest fix for this is on one of your pages at the bottom insert all your rollover images. The copy process will see all these images and copy them off the server so that when the Javascript runs the image it is looking for is on Reasonate.
Now you will be thinking, this is going to look silly, I don’t want a page with all these random images on it. To get around this problem go into the html code view enclose all those image tags with the following: 

<div style=”display: none;">

….All your rollover image tags i.e. <img xsrc=”images/myrollover1.jpg”/> ….

</div>

This <div style=”display: none”>..</div> set of tags will hide all these images from view. The copy process will still see all the images and download them for you but to the normal user they will not notice anything at all.

Alternatively for a solution that is far prettier but more time intensive checkout image rollovers using CSS. This is definitely in the extra's for experts category but also a technique that if you are planning on doing more websites you should get to know.

The following people had a website in their R-Drive but they did not have an index.html in their hand-in folder. The index.html file MUST BE in the hand-in folder, not buried two or three directories down. If it is not in the correct place the process that copies the files from the VUW server to Reasonate will not work.

I will be adding a process this afternoon that will synchronize your R-drive directory with Reasonate so if all goes well you should have your websites on Reasonate by dinner. Do not panic however, if you have issues please contact me via email describing your problem. The best way to do this is to write a Reasonate post and then check the notify administrators option below.

Due to a marvellous little feature of Viz there is apparently nothing we can do about the collapse  of Viz when we try to render in Light Studio. This feature is something that AutoDesk tried to implement to help people, but according to one expert I consulted it is a feature that many users of Viz worldwide are complaining about! So if you are members of the architectsrule.org collaborative because you have downloaded Viz/Revit etc - please complain! Now! LOUDLY! Everyone! I could have done with more time to prep my travel and your classes than trying to solve their problems.

So:

WHAT TO DO?

fortunately the answer is simple: use 3DS MAX 

The interface inside the program is much the same.

The material editor, the renderers, the sun system for Light STudio etc are all the same.

As we have 30 licenses of Max and 90 of Viz, please only use this program if you have had Revit render problems with Light Studio in Viz...

Good Luck! Hope no more issues come out of the woodwork to bite us in the soft unprotected regions ...

M 

I will be on a 'plane at 4:30pm on Tuesday heading at first to a  seminar on

Generative Components  run by Bentley about which you can find out more here I will not be at Tuesday's lecture. You will however be in very good hands - with some crucial information that should assist the hand in...

For this reason, I plan to come to make a presentation at the Tuesday 11:30 and the 1:30pm  tutorials on Light Studio materials as the lecture room LT1 demo has been a little unsatisfactory for me thus far.

M 

REF: dolphins  

Tuesday 30 May 3:30pm. For those who don't remember, the lectures are in LT1.

David Harrison has kindly agreed to talk through the process that he has described in his blog post on the summary web pages you are creating  for this Thursday's web site hand in.

Rachel Ryan will talk through how to post your files to a Google Earth locale.

============================================================== 

 Remember, the publish options in Dreamweaver that David has blogged will work from outside the schools of architecture and design. They do not work from inside the school. SO: IF YOU ARE PUBLISHING USING DREAMWEAVER FROM INSIDE THE SOAD:

when you set up your site  (or when you edit an existing site) as per the instructions in David's blog, mine and David's lectures and in the 'my first web page' tutorial on the bbsc303 web site, there is a small change that needs to be made:

When you select the remote info location to publish TO; you  should set

• the access as Local/Network
• the Remote Folder as your R:\drive file hand in location (REMEMBER your index.html file should be at the start level of this folder - the level defined by your name, not some sub-folder)

ASSIGNMENT 2: 

you hand in around 1 June 2006 (check web site timetable for  the date relevant to your class group)

you hand in a web page / pages on 2 June that summarises the model making / collaboration process and has a pointer to a web page / pages where the renders will appear the following week

ASSIGNMENT 1:

you hand in around 8 June 2006 (check web site timetable for  the date relevant to your class group)

you hand in the web page / pages with the renders in thumbnail form,  linking in each case to the larger format picture.

I have a thought that will help us all:

It is that we can all help each other develop a guide book / helpful suggestions good practice guide to rendering by tagging our problems and solutions appropriately. My idea is that we will rapidly reach a stage where when you have a problem / issue with rendering you will search through the tags for that program to find how other people have dealt with the issue.

So: could we please  use the following tags on the relevant blog entries:

Light Studio

Mental Ray 

Dreamweaver

Materials

People

Furniture

Skies

Plus, could you please add a tag of

Light Flow Meter 

to all uploaded pictures / questions about the array of white balls to be placed in a sectional view of your building about which Merete gave a lecture a couple of weeks back. 

To determine exactly what is meant by this imagine you are in practice and have just spent 4 months modelling and rendering this building but will be leaving to go overseas next week. You have to document enough so that a stranger to the project can sit down and learn what the project is all about and the processes behind it.

For example a new person to the team would have to understand:

• The file and CAD naming standards employed
• Who modeled what parts of the building in case there are further questions
• How the process by which the model was built and any issues that are not yet resolved
• Useful pieces of information that relate to the project or are generally useful to know (i.e. good rendering settings)

For the most part you have done an excellent job of recording all this information within the Reasonate blog posts. However these blogs posts are only so useful.
If you were the new person to the team you do not want to read everyone’s entire blogs to understand what has happened. What you want to do is read one concise document that has hyperlinks to the blog posts that relate to the information being discussed.

For your assignment 2 hand-in (i.e. your web-page) what you should focus on doing is putting together an html document (or set of documents) that provide this general overview of your project. This document should not recreate all the information you have already entered into your blogs. What it should do is outline the project and its processes in a clear, easy to understand manner and then within this outline provide hyperlinks to the relevant Reasonate blog posts that detail the issue.

Sorry for being deliberately vague on exactly how you should structure and word this document. What we are interested in is how you choose to tackle this problem keeping in mind that your completed work should be clear, concise and make extensive use of hyperlinks to the work you have submitted to Reasonate.

Just to give you some ideas on what is possible, you are not just limited to hyper-linking to a specific blog post (like this).
It is possible to hyperlink to all the things I tagged as funny by copying the url in the browser’s address bar.
Or if you like you could reference all the image files created by your project. To do so perform an advanced search, limiting the results to your project and only image files. On the results page click on the ‘Permalink’ button to get the url for this search in the address bar which you can then copy and paste into Dreamweaver.
If you have any questions please contact me either by posting a comment to this post or to my space in Reasonate.
 

'Edits I would like to my blog'

Or tag your post:

blog edits 

I will keep an eye out for posts with this title and make any reasonable changes you request. These edits should not be for simple spelling or grammar errors but rather times when you have experienced 'multiple postulation' or even worse, 'premature postulation' (some of you guys will understand) and are embarrassed of their existence.

Changes to the course information web site (after its final publication on 7 March 2006) are announced on that web site. For those who don't bother going back to that, here is a reminder of two crucuailly important pieces of info:

On the timetable page the deadline for hand in of assignment 1 has been moved ONLY FOR BArch Year 5, students, to 10 June 2006 from current 8 June date, so long as there are no other clashes with core courses. [Changed 25 May 2006]

On the timetable page the deadline for hand in of assignment 2 has been moved ONLY FOR BArch Year 3, ARCH 311 students, to 3 June 2006 from current 1 June date, so long as there are no other clashes with core courses. [Changed 1 April 2006] 

I was looking for the web site for the producers of Light Studio and discovered these cool images!

Check out the web site by clicking these images.

Follow up to my comment on David's post about publishing your files on the web..

Here are some screen captures of setting up a site - the first and most important thing to do...

M

Once this is done you should be able to instantly publish your site, and then check it online at Reasonate.

NB: to see stuff on the webarea in reasonat you need to follow the instructions to activate that function... 

NBB: sometimes when checking web sites online you will open a file only to be shown an old copy. This is a result of a trick that Internat Explorer and Firefox and other browsers use to speed themselves up. If you 'ask' them to load  a page they have laoded recently they will probably load a copy of the file from a local 'cache'. If you make a change in dreamweaver, publish and then browse and nothing looks different, it may be for this reason. To override this one normally presses <CTRL><F5> or <CTRL><R> to force a refresh off the original server...