So yea, yesterday I had my first University critique. I’m just gonna start off by saying that it wasn’t exactly what I expected. Now it could be just because it was our first crit, but what took place was not at all what I expected from the top 100 applicants. I was never a good student in high school, in fact, I merely passed NCEA level 1, shortly after discovering the competitive BAS course at the UoA, I worked hard to improve my grades (but still failed level 3 with excellence :/).
In year 13, I had a friend who was in the BAS course (she’s second year now), throughout the year, she fed me information regarding the course, I saw snips of her work and it really gave me a good sense of what was expected of me when my time came. So now you can kinda guess what I expected from my first crit, which is why I spent my entire weekend working on my project (admittedly, it took me 4 hours just to get my project onto ArchiCAD, haha ops). What I saw was not the complex diagrams and amazing artworks which I expected, instead, what I saw was empty boards of disappointment don’t get me wrong, the work that was posted up were absolutely amazing but I kinda expected a greater quantity of projects from a group of about thirty. There was about 8 projects pinned up, including my own (don’t quote me on this, maths was never my strength, which is why I took both stats and calc, I’ll let you find the logic in that :/). Now on to the actual crit.
To be honest, I held some degree of confidence in my project, now before you condemn my project for it’s simplicity, I’m just gonna add that this was the first time I’ve used ArchiCAD and I wasn’t exactly swimming in a ocean of spare time. without further ado, I give the you the three panels of my project.
Ok, NO MORE PRETTY PICTURES FROM HERE ONWARDS!
WARNING! Walls of text ahead.
If your still reading, it means that you probably want to read the boring details. Actually before I begin, I just want to add that these images were not my original three A3s for me 18 projects for second review, apparently our tutor; Judy said that we weren’t allowed to do any renderings, just meshes. However I don’t think anyone picked up on it and we headed straight for the pretty 3D ArchiCAD renderings. So moral of the story, buy a notebook so you won’t forget the important stuff, but alas I’ll probably forget to buy a notebook since I haven’t got a notebook to remind me to buy a notebook.
Now if your wondering why there are no words on my three panels, it’s not because I don’t like to write, as you can obviously tell that that is not the case by looking at the size of this post. Fun fact: My level 3 graphics projects consisted of an average word count of 15 thousand words, and that kids is how you get level 3 graphics with excellence (the chance of success shows a strong positive correlation to the size of your graphics class). It’s also because verbal presentations are easier to understand due to the lack of emphasis in literal texts and also because less words means bigger pictures 
.
So what my cyborg does is that it can look at any imagery and use his specially adapted robotic arms which has specially shaped pencil holding contraption to draw what he sees. He can also draw from his mind since he is still half human but the sketch will limited in the amount of detail and the speed he can generate these images with his brain, this will be slower as the creative parts of his brain has not been enhanced.
I first try to identify the limits to your pre-existing anatomy, I’ll start from the top to bottom. I first explored the limitations to our existing form, photo realistic sketching would ultimately fail if our eyes fails to see the small details, that’s why I replaced the eyes with camera-like lenses, I had originally planned to replace one of the eyes but then I realized that it takes 2 to differentiate depth. Another limitations to our ability to sketch fast is the structure of our arms, because of the ball and socket joint, we cannot easily draw perfectly straight, as a simple swing of our pencil marks an arc on paper. It is for this reason, I’ve created a specialized tool at the end of the robotic arms, these ‘pencil holders’ allows the pencil to run around the rims, they are connected to the robotic arms using a ball and socket joint so they can rotate 360 degrees to draw a circle. I had originally wanted to add the robotic arms under our pre-existing arms, but the extra limbs proved to limit the movements of the arms so I decided to put it behind our arms, stemming from out back.
On the shoulders of the cyborg, I’ve placed a pencil sharpener and storage compartments to the cyborg can preform his tasks more efficiently. As anyone who’s done sketching outdoors will know, it’s a pain to have to grab something out of your bag as your hands will be occupied, with the augmentations, you can use your secondary sets of arms to hold the sketch board up as you do your thing.
Phew, I think that was my entire verbal presentations, if it isn’t. Oh well!
