Model No. ZS-X3CP Personal Audio System

I teach designers how to model their ideas using 3D software and computers, a process I call Creative CAD.  This is the time in the semester when we shift focus away from modeling and focus instead on visualization.

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Modeling is about the development of form.  Visualization is about material, color, texture, and the composition of images.

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Both modeling and visualization have their analog analogs.  Modeling relates to clay and carving, the physical act of addition and subtraction.  Visualization is photography and painting.

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Just as a painter might struggle to discover the technique that will capture the look of real-world phenomena in a medium, the digital artist struggles to capture those same phenomena in digital materials.  How does one describe the sheen of a diffuse highlight?  How does texture distort light?  How does the angle of incidence change when light refracts through a translucent medium?  What affects the softness of a shadow?  The answers to these questions get really technical, and can quickly drive the bored and impatient to despair.  For the curious, deep study of this digital alchemy can result in its own form of madness, since the material world will never look the same.  A lot of thought can go into the design of the perfect shadow.  It is all so theatrical.

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The image above reminds me of a bug-eyed character from a Hayao Miyazaki film… maybe the Cat Bus or a Totoro.

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When I first started teaching Creative CAD to college students, I would start them off modeling an ant and a squid.  I figured that if a person could model these creatures, the same person could model just about anything.  Eventually enough people failed to make the connection between cephalopod anatomy and the next generation of land-fill, so I retooled the class around the fancy dust collectors for which the interested parties were clamoring.  This is when I introduced them to the Sony ZS-X3CP.

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My own Sony ZS-X3CP stopped working a long time ago after a hard fall (yard work, curious neighbor).  This modeling gig has saved it (for now) from parts salvage and the dumpster.

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Once materials are designed and applied, visualization becomes a kind of photography.  Virtual cameras occupy a point in space, so they can shoot from angles and places where no real camera could ever go.

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Also, with the toggle of a switch, virtual cameras can have unlimited depth of field.  Everything stays in focus, which is unlike traditional photography, but quite a bit like the human eye.  Actually, eyes are also like traditional photography, with blurry peripheral vision, but our brains cause our eyes to instantly focus on anything we observe in our direct line of site.  It takes illness, alcohol or effort to blur our vision (assuming decent vision).  Look around for yourself.  Turn your head quickly to catch the world off guard.  It all stays in focus.  And be honest — you can’t really make out the clarity in your peripheral vision well enough to comment on its focus.  The world has some sweet graphics.

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I enjoy these closeups that become landscape.

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Students often create the most boring renderings.  They never have enough time to really explore and play with the medium.  In so many ways school is counterproductive.

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The virtual model is so pristine, and the virtual images are just so sexy.  Whenever I look at the real ZS-X3CP, I always feel let down.  In Cormack McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, the character of The Judge hunts scalps and haunts the West with a rifle and a sketchbook.  The Judge sketches what he sees before destroying it.  I’m not sure what he gains through the mayhem, but I understand taking meaningful possession of something through its rendering.  I’m listening to Haruki Murakami’s book (on tape) What I Talk About When I Talk About Running,  a focused memoir of sorts meditating on more than thirty years of long distance running.  In explaining why he would write such a specific personal history he notes that not until he has written about something can he come to understand what it means to him.  With a virtual copy of the ZS-X3CP that now far surpasses the material fantasy that first inspired me to drop some coin on this hunk of plastic in the first place, it may now be time to finally separate its parts.

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When the virtual camera gets close enough to the subject, digital fingerprints abound.  For example, in the image below, shot from inside the speaker, the right edge of the yolk-like dust cover appears as a series of straight segments.  This is because everything in a 3D digital rendering is generated from polygon meshes.  If we look close enough, we can see the polygons.  I enjoy seeing process marks in visual media.

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The light and shadow in the image below makes me think of Caravaggio paintings or a Vermeer.  The composition conjures for me a Hokusai wave.

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In the virtual world, multiples are as easy as ‘copy’ and ‘paste.’

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6 responses to “Model No. ZS-X3CP Personal Audio System”

  1. chirping insect says:

    Awesome photos. And the Miyazaki comparison is right on.

  2. Tim says:

    That’s one cool looking gizmo, and I love these digital models.

    I have no idea, though, how this process might work. When you say “virtual camera”, what do you mean, exactly? How does one go about making a digital model of an extant item? The magic of amazing software is involved, I’m sure, but does it involve feeding an actual photo of the item, too?

    Also, it’s interesting to me that, compared to your digital versions, the photo makes the ZS-X3CP look like a George Foreman grill.

  3. 2. Virtual cameras are observation points floating around in space. When you play a video game and observe a three dimensional video game environment, you are manipulating a virtual camera.

    How does one make a virtual model of an extant item? With photos and guessing. My model is actually very different than the real ZS-X3CP, and those differences reflect poor guesses or attempts to improve on the original. So yes, reverse engineering will often use photos of objects. Far better than tracing photos is tracing the 3D form itself. This can be done with a Faro Arm, a robotic arm-like contraption that plots points in real 3D space. With a Faro Arm you can trace the real object with a great deal of exactness.

    The real ZS-X3CP is a piece of crap.

  4. Dave says:

    Very cool, Rogan. Great shots.

    I like the idea of trying to get the students to make the connection between their studies in industrial design and landfills.

  5. Stella says:

    These images are delicious. I love how surreal and alien they feel. As you say, the close-ups are like landscapes. And I like the image of the multiples…a martian invasion of consumables.

    I think the whole issue of CAD versus drawing and modeling is very interesting. Obviously CAD is an amazing tool that is the design process, but I know many people in the architectural world who feel it’s critical for students to be able to draw, to have drafting skills, to be able to create their own 3-D models. The popular artist David Macaulay (http://www.davidmacaulay.com/) advocates drawing as a way of truly seeing, and therefore understanding, the world we build.

  6. Rogan says:

    4. Yes, most of the stuff coming out of industrial design programs is destined for the landfill, a fact that gets paid a lot of lip service in design school. Ultimately, however, the inherently conservative nature of educational institutions ensures that we prepare students to ‘think green,’ but take the best paying job you can land. Art school has its own brand of pernicious conservativism, a byproduct (imo) of the high price of tuition in preparation for a highly competitive job market where the jobs don’t pay very much. For a significant number of students, parents are floating the bill, and those parents often have one question — will by child be able to get a job after college? Much of the curriculum seems designed to address this question, and so we think forward, but design in the present… or more often than not, we design for yesterday. Unfortunate.

    5. The issue of CAD versus drawing and modeling IS very interesting. I too know many people in the architectural world who feel it’s critical for students to be able to draw. I don’t think it is necessary to know how to ‘draft.’ Drafting is a dinosaur made completely unnecessary by CAD, and where I totally advocate for the importance of drawing/sketching in the design process (and also as a unique way of seeing/thinking), as soon as I hear a designer advocate hand drafting, I know that I am listening to an old dog that refuses to learn the new trick. The beauty of a hand-drafted drawings DOES transfer over to CAD drafting, but it takes a lot of time and effort to develop those skills. Thus any time spent learning to hand-draft is time that could have been spent learning to CAD draft. That hand drafting is taught at all is evidence of the inherently conservative nature of the academy. There are a few critical exceptions to this rule, demonstrated by artists like Silke Schatz, who carve out a unique style in the narrow space between quality CAD drawings and hand drafting, and some ART students might be justified in continuing to explore that space. But it makes no sense for design students to waste their time learning to hand draft.

    Drawing and sketching, however, will always be essential skills, and it almost always follows that among my students, those with the best drawing abilities prove to be the best CAD artists as well. Drawing IS a way of thinking and understanding the world.