Union Station and Downtown Los Angeles in the twenty-first century

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2012.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis. Vita.Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-149).Ideas about a city are powerful forces, and have lasting impacts on the built environment. While not every vision is realized in the built form, every aspect of urban development is the reflection of a vision about what the city should be. This is especially true in Los Angeles. Today, the ideas and trends that shaped the development of that city, and many American metropolises, in the twentieth century are falling away, presenting the opportunity for new visions of downtown development and civic space to take form. This work seeks to understand the origins and effects of past visions for Downtown Los Angeles, critique the potential of current visions, and propose new ideas for urban development and public space, using the concepts of civic space and convergence as lenses and Los Angeles Union Station as a focal point. This work is divided into three parts. The first explores the visions and trends that shaped Los Angeles in the twentieth century and their influence on the city today. The second looks at current and emerging trends that are likely to inform the growth of the city in the twenty-first century, which suggest a new type of city is emerging: one in which economic activity, transportation networks and the city's cultures converge downtown. From this study, and an examination of two cities influenced by those trends (London and New York), are derived design principles for transit-oriented civic space networks in city centers. The third part narrows in on Union Station as a site, taking those principles and applying them to create a scenario for the future development of the station area, which is in part a projection of the current and emerging trends and in part an act of imagination, leaping beyond the status quo to envision a better city which does not yet exist, but could. In the conceptual design presented here, Union Station serves three important functions as both a gateway and a destination, a link between the city's past and future, and a cultural crossroads. The station becomes a focal element in a new model for urban development: the convergent city, in which Downtown Los Angeles is not the focus of everyday life, but reemerges as the center of civic life.by Jaymes Phillip Dunsmore.M.C.P

Generation of 3D characters from existing cartoons and a unified pipeline for animation and video games.

Despite the remarkable growth of 3D animation in the last twenty years, 2D is still popular today and often employed for both films and video games. In fact, 2D offers important economic and artistic advantages to production. In this thesis has been introduced an innovative system to generate 3D character from 2D cartoons, while maintaining important 2D features in 3D as well. However, handling 2D characters and animation in a 3D environment is not a trivial task, as they do not possess any depth information. Three different solutions have been proposed in this thesis. A 2.5D modelling method, which exploits billboarding, parallax scrolling and 2D shape interpolation to simulate the depth between the different body parts of the characters. Two additional full 3D solution have been presented. One based on inflation and supported by a surface registration method, and one that produces more accurate approximations by using information from the side views to solve an optimization problem. These methods have been introduced into a new unified pipeline that involves a game engine, and that could be used for animation and video games production. A unified pipeline introduces several benefits to animation production for either 2D and 3D content. On one hand, assets can be shared for different productions and media. On the other hand, real-time rendering for animated films allows immediate previews of the scenes and offers artists a way to experiment more during the making of a scene

Updates

Richard Bud Meade worked in Human Resources at the College at Brockport from 1968-2000. He knew many of our faculty and staff and in retirement he began to circulate an email newsletter which passed on stories and news about various college retirees. This remarkable, ongoing project has captured a tremendous amount of information about the folks who built the college over the last 50 years. This collection of his Update is searchable, and covers from the beginning in 2001 up to August, 2020. More will be added as time goes on..