Alex Schreyer is Program Director and Senior Lecturer in the Building and Construction Technology Program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, MA. He has been teaching courses in Building Information Modeling and Computer-Aided Design, Building materials and construction methods, wood properties as well as a culmination graduate structural design class in the M.Arch. architecture program. He mainly focuses on the behavior of wood-based structural systems with a particular interest in innovative connection systems for wooden structures. Basically he is expert in the subjects like Teaching and Curriculum Department; AEC/CAD and BIM Modeling and Architectural Visualization; Computational Digital Design; Digital Fabrication, 3D Printing; Digital and Web-Based Tools in Architecture; Construction and Planning; Building Materials and Construction Methods; North American and European Structural Design Standards and Building Practices; Design of Wood Structures; Wood-Concrete Composite Structural Systems; Connections in Heavy-Timber Structural Systems; Optimization Approaches in Design; Web Development and Social-Media Outreach; Software-and Script-Development; Graphic Design.

He is also the author of “Architectural Design with SketchUp” which provides a beginner-to-intermediate-level summary of many techniques to know more about the work with the popular 3D modeling application Trimble SketchUp. He is also the co-author on the extensively-used reference and textbook “Fundamentals of Residential Construction”, which provides a total knowledge of the materials and method used in single and multi-family residential construction.

Alex uses the Patterned panel exercise to make the basic geometry but it can be replaced the curved wave pattern with another beautiful pattern or can have the cutout pattern generated on colors in an image to create a logo or landscape etc. He wanted to make a candle holder in a wonderful shape which needed to have a curved surface which has two approaches: 1) need to make a curved surface and placed the geometry onto it by adding and subtracting it; 2) creating the panels flat and then curving them. To create the first surface Alex created the entire panel at first and bended it with Thomthom’s TrueBend extension; besides it there are other extensions to do this task are Chris Fullmer’s CLF Shape Bender, Flowify or the bending tool in the FredoScale toolset.