Of e-mails and iPads

Have you had a chance to read all the great articles about architecture-related iPad apps on ArchiCADmonkey? There are a ton of apps out there and more being announced everyday (I haven’t forgotten about you OrthoGraph). All those articles and a fortuitous e-mail from a friend in the Netherlands convinced me to enter the BIMx competition that Graphisoft is running and hopefully win myself an iPad 2.

You can download my entry here.

If I’m going to enter, it better be something special.

I love zombies. Back in 2005 and 2006 I was in a band that played a lot of zombie-themed songs. We even played the Zombie Pub Crawl in Minneapolis in 2006, when it was 300 people and not 10,000 people. Here are some goofy photos (link now dead…) from that show (I’m the bassist with the really short hair). I’ll probably talk more about this later, but let’s just say I can trace my love of zombies back to watching Night of the Comet when I was 6 or 7. (side note, as a father of 2 young girls, I will not let them watch zombie movies that young, even campy ones like Night of the Comet).

Pondering that fortuitous e-mail and daydreaming about how much BIMx is like a videogame, I realized I could make a zombie apocalypse BIMx file. And so that’s what I’ve submitted. Here are some screen shots:

Tell me more, tell me more.

I’ve got a lot to share about the how and why of my BIMx file, which I’m calling Zombie Attack 2011. Too much for one blog post. So here’s the deal. For every 50 likes I get, I’ll write a blog post explaining the how and why of various parts of the BIMx and ArchiCAD file. It turns out, not only is a zombie apocalypse BIMx file a great way to show off what BIMx can do, the ArchiCAD model needed to create the BIMx file uses a lot of tricks that are very useful for our typical mundane day to day work. Here’s a tentative list of some blog posts I’ve got brewing:

1. PolyCount Add-On and Airships
2. Locked Doors and Red Doors (and what’s behind them)
   (even though the competition is over, I’ll try to write these posts, someday…)
3. Burned Down Buildings
   
4. Shadowy Zombies and Glowing Tanks
5. Broken Glass and Guns

Thank you so much and Happy Halloween!