Ride the Dragon

This year I have started to use SFM/MVS methods to conserve Skatespots. This method uses many photographs from different views of an object to reconstruct a 3-dimensional point cloud. See the Skatespot Conservation project for more details.

A friend of mine, Lilo Krebernik got the chance to realize a skateable sculpture at an exhibition in Shanghai. He had to design the sculpture, provide 3D plans for pre-construction and construct the sculpture on location in Shanghai within one month. The sculpture, a rideable pump-track, is based on bodies made of styrofoam. They have been shaped in advance and the time schedule didn’t allow for much adaption on site - so the plans had to be precise.

Knowing my work on the 3D reconstructions of spots that he skates regularly, Lilo has used these reconstructions to ensure that his design is skateable. I extracted selected profiles from the 3D reconstruction of the St. Marx DIY-skatespot. Lilo used the unfolded profiles as templates for his design. Next, I received some general cross sections and dimensions of the planned building elements. The planned elements were wobbles and steep berms to gain speed throughout the pump-track. Based on these overall dimensions I used my coding skills to create solid models of the elements with parametric modeling using OpenSCAD and solid-python. The parametric modeling made it easy to deliver a large set of elements at various sizes an styles to experiment with.