Snow Globe series: Santa's SPA by Andrii Levko

[Rubia Torres]

Welcome to our series of articles from the Snow Globe Challenge!

We invited some of the designers who participated in the challenge to elaborate on their entries, share their workflows and tips&tricks.

Enjoy and feel free to drop us a comment if you have any questions.

Now passing the mic to Andrii Levko!

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SPA and winter bathing

Concept for Santa’s SPA

I work as an architect and BIM Manager for a company that deals with the design of family houses. I specialized in BIM design, modeling workflows and Archicad template creation.

Since last year, I am interested in designing modular and tiny houses on wheels. I even got a few freelance projects for a tiny house design. I'm attaching some pictures of my project below.

Some other projects that inspired me, from DMDmodular and My Home Office:

Smart House B79V, DMDmodular

My Home Office, Netherlands

Based on this experience, I decided to create a tiny modular SPA for Santa Claus for Snow Globe Challenge. It would be nice if Santa had his own SPA, and I wanted it to be relaxing and cozy.

 

Modelling workflow

1. Shape

I started with the shape of the SPA building. With one operation, I created a rectangle from walls with external dimensions of 217x204. I chose Roof geometry method: multi-plane - it speeds up my work - and used Solid Element Operations to cut off the walls, and in a few clicks I had a shape of Santa’s SPA.

A curtain wall is best for glazing. To cut it, I used the “Crop to Single-plane Roof” operation, then the curtain wall profiles adjust to the roof! Of course, before I did that, I had to convert the multi-plane roof to a single-plane. You can see it on the first video below:

2. Facade covering

To cover the façade with a standing seam roof, Archicad has the Roof Accessories option, but it will not be possible to use it for walls, so I just used the library element "Profiled Sheet".  In this case I have the opportunity to perfectly match the seam standing on the roof surface and on the wall surface. And this element allows for many options with cutting Planes as I needed for the back wall of the SPA.

3. Windows, door and details

For modeling the snow on the roof, I used the roof tool which I then converted into morphs, to be able to smooth the edges a bit, Archicad allows to do it with "Fillet/Chamfer". Or you can hide all edges of the morph, click on the edge and in the popping up window select "Custom Edge settings" and apply to all edges you need to hide or its possible in "Morph selection Settings" as well. 

4. Environment and Rendering

I downloaded the environment elements from https://www.archibaseplanet.com/. I thought that it would be great to revive this environment of Santa somehow, and I made footprints in the snow from Santa's shoe. For Lighting, I used General Light; and Cineware Engine for rendering.

Final result:

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Get to know Andrii Levko:

Andrii is an Ukrainian architect, based in Poland for last 5 years now. He works as an architect and BIM Manager for an architectural company in Krakow.

He has a Master's degree in Architecture by Kiev University of Architecture and Warsaw University of Technology. He is a certified Graphisoft BIM Manager and has been using Archicad since 2003, v. 8.1.

Andrii is a challenge enthusiast and is currently in the hall of fame of the Archicad Online Test, versions 22-25 👏

Location:

Krakow, Poland

Connections:

It seems like Andrii is a low profile guy, but you can connect with him on LinkedIn.

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Check out our series of articles about the Snow Globe designs

Buckminster Fuller Snow Globe by Heimo Mooslechner

Snowy Pasargad Snow Globe by Sepideh Kolahi
Christmas In Space Snow Globe by Kamen Nikolov

Happy New Year Snow Globe by Bart Cuppens