BLOCKTOWN is a community art project powered through your comments and engagement. It’s an experimental game of city-making, a digital Madurodam. With each post, a new layer of buildings will be added to the Town. Your photographs, quotes, stories and feedback are the raw materials that drive construction for each new layer.
A New Character!
Thank you to @finleyexp for the thoughtful image submission! This building in BLOCKTOWN has a full backstory which you can read about here.
Villa Numina is an ancient retreat where Blocktown creatives can abide, relax, create, and/or meet over a meal (or a pint of what-have-you). Located on the outskirts of Blocktown, the villa keep its rustic appeal while remaining close enough to the town center that visitors have no problem reaching modern amenities.
Take a look at the design process (below) assembling and modeling the Villa structure, beginning with the 2D image submission and growing the 3D modeled character.
How to Play
Take a look at the announcement post, here. Each building and landscape element of BLOCKTOWN will be derived directly from your comments. Photographs, quotes and stories will inspire their own design logic and manifest themselves as 3D characters within the Town.
If you'd like to participate beyond image comments, download the Rhino template file I've prepared on Github and assemble a custom building of your own. Once you re-upload it, I'll add it in.
An Experiment in Building Community
Through this project - I hope to engage in a broader dialogue with fellow Steemians about their own sense of place and placemaking. These types of game-structured conversations are a fascinating way of learning more about what a person defines as his or her “community.” It’s a way of connecting to one another through the geographies we are deeply tied to and knowledgeable of. In a world of links, likes, upvotes and IP addresses, it’s exciting to find ways of bridging the digital divide and connecting with those on the other side of the screen.
Old man Gruff lives in a strange house he built himself, surrounded by trees. He used to spend more time outside but he doesn’t really do well with others so now that the village is growing he barely steps outside. The development has yet to reach his neck of the woods but it seems to grow closer every day. If you walk y you can hear him banging away though as he makes haphazard additions to his asymmetrical house. As his land is limited and he doesn’t want to be any nearer to his neighbors, he just keeps building upwards. Hopefully his awkward looking tower won’t fall down.
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@whatamidoing, this is a beautiful and descriptive concept. I'll do my best to interpret and model something that resonates with your mind's eye. (And Old man Gruff's)
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Great addition to the collection. Happy to see that you have modelled my suggestion in one of your previous posts. I would be happy to join and help with the project!
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Thanks so much @curiosit! You can download the github file here to play with the 3D file if you like.
https://github.com/blocktown/blocktown
I'll be uploading the whole project soon for anyone to download and build with (for now, those are just the "blocks" to play)
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When i had the opportunity to learn 3D modelling i threw it away
But now i will a thousand dollars to learn it.
Thanks for rekindling the energy to learn in me
Nice post
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Exercise those 3D modeling muscles! Rhino is has a free trial available for Mac and PC if you're interested :D
https://www.rhino3d.com/download
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Thanks Alot @Voroni
Will check it out ASAP
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This, brother, is AWESOME.
I'll try to contribute with some stories!
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Excellent, please do!
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Thats awesome! I will look into this and submit some ideas as well. Very interesting!
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Thanks @tarekadam, I thought this might be up your alley! ;)
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Aaaah, I can see the Roman vibe already! hehe.
Collosseum here we go!
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It's in the queue! Haha should be ready soon :)
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@voronoi this is so freaking cool!!! I totally dig it! Thanks for making Villa Numina and Blocktown happen.
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Hi, I really like the creativity of this community and the way in which they see things, I also like to design from time to time. I would like to belong to it and download the program to make a small contribution since I liked the work of the buildings, it seems great and I liked being able to find this site
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Interpretation of Therme Vals by Peter Zumthor for rest and respite!
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Love the project by the way and would really like to get involved more/learn more about the process! I am an artist new to steemit. Any tags or other areas of steemit I should check out to get involved with the art/design/architecture community? Thanks for all the great content and inspiration!
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Thank you for posting, I really like it, happy to meet your post @voronoi
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A very brilliant program, grown from creative ideas, I am happy to meet and greet people like you @vorono
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very nice and very informative post. i followed you because u always share valuable content,keep sharing such posts.very good
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Your work shocks the world of steemit, incredible. !!
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How do you always manage to make such interesting posts? Do you play chess? I'm going round creating chess awareness. Here's d link to the tutorials https://steemit.com/dtube/@perpz/vmvw8wyu
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A very interesting concept/project indeed. Something I will defiantly be checking out soon. Thanks for sharing it with us.
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I think the ancient retreat of Villa Numina is not the right approach to experiment as to claim it as a new character. New character @voronoi ?! It all looks nice and pretty but tell us frankly what is new is this type of classic fortress design style? Remember at this time design were made by this sort of blocks because that was the technology available at the time, for design and eventually construction. Use the technology to give us something new. If you like so much geometry apply the Fibonacci principles in your character and try to bring something interesting and new before claim it as a new character. Do like your concept of adding to the village and design a community because that's what one of my work is about (the reason I follow your posts) but it does not add anything to my work/research because there is nothing new or contemporary in this type of design and you are experimenting in the wrong direction @voronoi sorry. You should post as let's copy and repeat our classic cities and play because that's what you are doing misleading the people with the idea of something new. I have been constructive here you should bring new approach to proclaim it as a new character, because it is not and you're not experimenting anything really to claim it as an experimental game of city-making.
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@voronoi why don't give a try to Voronoi Diagram as a grid for landscape?
I have in mind a lot of ideas how to make organic low-poly scenes with Voronoi. Looks promissing and interesting to me.
I can share more in my posts later ;)
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BTW, this is how it looks like in real life
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This is fantastic! What a great landscape element to contrast the blocky buildings... I'll get going on this soon :)
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I like the idea !! I'll try to contribute .
I have 3Dsmax2015, i think it will work if i use your rhino file.
@voronoi
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Haha! So nice and smart idea! Very fun game!
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Hi, I'm Louis, I also like to draw building and your modeling is so creative I like it! Hope you post more! @voronoi
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That's a brilliant idea! I would love to see how blocktown continues to develop. An architecture element I'd love to see in the future would be second floors of family houses larger than the first allowing some overhang over the streets (making them feel kind of cosier).
This is a typical element of older Bulgarian architecture that I really like.
Like those examples:
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This is just awesome, what a great idea and super fun tu be in. As you know or maybe don't Im a graphic designer, so I'll be checking the GitHub to see if I can help with something.
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