Samir's Creative Ideas & Online Enterprise Blog - Page 39 of 40

Structural Integrity

The next decision to make regarding my new site is the organization of its various part, its structure. While my old site was purely an online portfolio, I want this one to have some real content. I am interested in many things besides the work I end up doing and I would like the new site to reflect that variety.

Where to begin? First let’s get the obvious out of the way. This site should still act as a showcase of my work, so a portfolio section is mandatory. But after seeing the end result that is my old site, I am not for having a portfolio section with sub-sections for the types of work I want to show. Why? Usability – in my old site the viewer needed to click on ‘portfolio’ on the main page, then click on a sub-section like ‘new media’, and then click on a thumbnail representation to actually display the description and images of a project. That’s three levels of links to get to my work. Too much. Why am I making it excessively difficult for people to see my work? After all that is one of the reasons I want them on my site, so how can I make their browsing experience easier, and therefore more pleasant?

One way would be to have all links to my work on one master portfolio page. The problems with this is that this one page would continue to get bigger, and the file weight of all those thumbnails would add up quickly – not a very 56K-friendly thing to do. Also, someone interested in viewing only one aspect of my work would be overwhelmed with everything I have to show (blatant optimism :)). This means a segregation of my work is necessary. The best option might be to have direct access to the different sections of my portfolio from my main page, thus cutting out one level of hierarchy. Now I need to know how many sections I want in my ‘showcase’. I need one for design (a segregation between print and new-media is becoming increasingly irrelevant, also what is ‘new media’?), one for photography, and now the complex part – sections for illustration, animation and 3D. The problem with the last 3 sections is this: items in the illustration and animation section could also equally belong to the 3D section. The obvious solution is to get rid of ‘3D’ and only have illustration and animation sections for still and motion graphics respectively, irrespective of whether they were born in a 3D or 2D world. This might be a problem for people coming to see my 3D work (blatant optimism redux :D), since the work will be spread across two sections. This matter needs some more thought.

Ok now for the new content. This blog is the first piece of content, which will continue to reside on the new site. Hopefully my knowledge of Blender will continue to grow with time, and since I hope for this to be a regularly updated site, there will also be plenty to say about on-going site news and “re-invention.” So, ‘updatingly yours’ still remains relevant – a sort of replacement for the ‘what’s new’ page found on many sites. The ideas for the remaining content are still in a nebulous phase. What I do know is that I want to write articles on communication and the visual arts which might take the form of a blog with each post acting as a link to longer articles. That’s all I have at the moment. There are also some thoughts about downloadable content. Maybe tutorials in PDF? It all depends on how people respond to these ideas. So a lot remains to be seen. But, at least basically I have decided to have sections of the portfolio accessible from the main page, content sections (possibly ‘articles’, ‘tutorials’, ‘downloads’), and maybe a link to a ‘contact’ page with the required information.

Hmm… now comes the all important decision about the main page. But that’s is for another post.

Reflecting on a puddle

I finally managed to get an environmental map working in Blender to make a reflective object. I found the standard tutorial for envmaps to be a little confusing, but this (scroll down) proved to be very useful in providing a simple series of steps for the basic effect. I still need to explore multiple recursive reflections, which were introduced in the last few releases of Blender. And of course, a reflective sphere is one thing, but actually making convincing reflective real-world objects is a different story. Back to work.

For your eyes only?

In the early days of the web, making a website was straightforward. You simply wrote one long HTML page, and if you were a real artist you threw in a few graphics and actually organized your page into relevant sections. No decisions to make. Simple.

That was then, this is now. I now want to make a new website. Simple? Not quite. First I need to decide on which formats and technologies I want to use in the site. What will I use? HTML, DHTML, XHTML, XML, PHP, ASP, CSS, Javascript, PERL, JAVA, VBscript, Flash, Shockwave, PDF, RealMedia, WindowsMedia, Quicktime, DivX, VRML … the list goes on. Plus it’s not even a simple matter of what suits your needs, you also need to keep in mind if the technology you are using will be usable/readable by your audience.

What do I do? Firstly let me just ignore all the multimedia technologies at the moment as they only aim to augment an existing website, and not act as a replacement for a site. So that leaves us with the HTML variants, Flash, and the choice of programming language. The coding languages are also an additional element to the actual site, but VBscript is out because of its Windows-centric nature, JAVA is out because I am not totally convinced of its stability. Besides, many people (myself included) switch off the JAVA setting in their browsers to keep their sanity. Javascript can be used to the minimum since it is now almost standard extension of HTML. However, issues of compatibility and unpredictable results remain. That leaves PERL, which is a great choice for more complex coding solutions. The decision has already been made in its favour because Greymatter, the blogging software currently chugging away in the background is written in PERL. The results, as you can see, are quite satisfactory.

Now we come to that gigantic fork in the road. That never ending battle that is fought with religious fervour, and has seen many a casualty on both sides. What am I talking about?

Flash or HTML?

Fortunately (or unfortunately ?) I am religious about this topic as well. If you see my old site, you will notice that it is hand coded in HTML and all the links are text. Do I look like a Flash lover? No, sorry, for me it’s HTML all the way. Let me clarify though, that I do not hate Flash with a vengeance. I do know how to use the software, but I simply do not consider it a means of presenting a web site. I personally skip nearly every Flash intro I come cross, and I avoid complete Flash sites like the plague, unless I simply have to see what is on the site. Plus, no matter how many figures Macromedia publishes about the stupendous download figures of its plugin, Flash is still not universal, and everyone out there does not have a trillion megahertz monster to run it on. In addition Flash content disrupts the standard interface of the web browser. Suddenly things don’t work like they are supposed to, the back button, the right-click menu. This is not a good thing.

I do have the Flash plugin on my system, but not Shockwave. Occasionally I come across a site that pops up a prompt in my browser to download the Shockwave plugin. While I am aware it is quick and painless, I have yet to come across any content which has convinced me to press the OK button. If it is any consolation, I do think Flash is an excellent technology for animation. That is what it started out as, but with all the hype surrounding its position as harbinger of the multimedia superhighway, its true importance as an efficient means of animation dispersal has been sidelined. Now there is a move to make SVG the new format of vector animation and interactive content. The one advantage it has is that it is an open standard, but its actual performance in the wild remains to be seen.

So, ultimately we come back to HTML. It has changed a lot over the years, for the better. The on-going effort to standardize it and to separate the function of content presentation from it has lead to the timely eminence of CSS. Cascading Style Sheets are simple text files that tell the browser how the content in the XHTML(the cleaner, leaner standards compliant HTML) should be displayed. Also, CSS has features that the old HTML couldn’t dream off: complex control of column layouts, transparencies, layers, and a built in ability to create roll-over effects with out the complex Javascript code it called for in the past. To top it off the ability to apply master style sheets to multiple XHTML pages breaks new ground in the malleability and maintainability of your site. Simply change the CSS and you have what looks like a brand new site. This feature is best demonstrated by the CSS Zen Garden.

XHTML with CSS it is then! As in many aspects of the design of my new site, this blog is also acting as my experiment in CSS. I am still not as familiar with CSS as I am with basic HTML, but the latest version of Greymatter which I am running does use CSS for layout. Through tweaking the default templates I am starting to get a feeling of the sheer sense of freedom and power CSS can give the designer of web content. I am enjoying every moment of it and will continue to see what it can be pushed to do. I am also looking into what software can help with CSS coding an design, but my report on that is for an other time.

Cliff Dweller

I’m finally getting into doing some tutorials in Blender. I was browsing around and this mesh based terrain modelling technique caught my attention. It could be done with only blender and didn’t need to involve fractal height maps, so I gave it a whirl. Manipulating complex organic organic meshes is surprisingly un-daunting in the Blender interface. I was able to achieve the basic model quite painlessly.

I seem to have some innate problem with completing tutorials “by the book”, so as usual at this point I went off on a tangent. Playing around with the World settings took up quite a bit of time but that resulted in a weird and wonderful sky. It was satisfactory, but not quite. It needed something. So, I set out to model a figure to put into the landscape – yes I know that is a ridiculous thing to do for a newbie, but stranger things have happened.

A few hours later, after many mistakes and a lot of searching on how to group objects, I finally came up with this very stick-figure robot with no neck. Not bad for a first try. I put my mechanical friend into the landscape, posed him thanks to a basic parenting setup, and rendered away. The floating head thing wasn’t very convincing so I put in a box for the neck and played around with a halo material till I was satisfied. A good few hours of inefficient Blendering, but a good start I think.

Blogger’s choice

Since I want my new site to be regularly updated with fresh content, I thought getting to grips with blogging technology would be great idea. While I have no interest in writing long touching posts about the sad but true story of my feline pet’s reproductive ineptitude :confused:, the web log as an organizational structure has many advantages. Beyond being easy to update, it is also an efficient and familiar format. People on the web are familiar with the conventions of interacting with a blog, which makes them more receptive to the content. For me the most important aspect of the web log format is the ability to allow readers to comment on content. In some ways blogs seem to not only allow, but encourage commentary and discussion, which can only add to the strength of the content.

Maintaining ‘updatingly yours’ is part of my learning process to become comfortable with the formatting and design of blogs, as I foresee having a handful of sections in the site which would benefit from this structure. When I first decided to start this section, there were a few decision to be made, because the blog is a very varied animal. To begin with I decided that I didn’t want to go for one of those ready-made blogging services, purely because I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of my content depending on an external service.

The next decision to make was which of the many personally hosted blogging tools to use. There are many out there, but the first one to catch my attention was MovableType. Sites made with it seemed well organized, and some of them were gorgeous. When I explored further on their site, however, a few things put me off. Firstly this software is not really free. The terms and conditions for “personal non-professional use” can be very iffy when you are a freelance designer, one of those rare breeds of homo sapiens who never seem to be NOT working. The second issue was a technical one. MovableType depends on a back end database engine. This is near impossible to test out on a free web space because it is considered a high end feature by web hosts; it puts an excess strain on their servers.

So, Movable type was out. Next I came across Blosxom. It was tiny! I loved it. It could work with just a CGI-BIN, which some free hosts do provide. It was totally free and open source, and its database engine consisted purely of directories and simple text files – definitely something I could live with. In addition it could be augmented with a plethora of plugins to do almost anything I could think up. So, I downloaded the 17Kb file loaded up the web page with the installation instructions and waited for the magic to happen. Unfortunately it didn’t. For one thing, Blossom’s documentation needs some major work. Second, and more important was a technical issue. Blosxom works by creating the blog page live every time someone requests it. While that sounds good in theory and has many advantages, it is an unnecessary strain to put on a server, especially a free one.

I was almost giving up on the whole blog idea when I came across Greymatter quite by chance. The reason I hadn’t found it before is that it was actually the first of these type of tools, plus the development had been almost non-existent over the last couple of years. But, it was open source so I tried it, and here you have the result. The thing I liked about Greymatter was that it worked pretty well to begin with, once all the necessary settings had been entered. Also it is a bit of a Goldilocks story because, while MovableType is very user friendly (by all accounts), and Blosxom is a code hackers dream, Greymatter forms a very comfortable middle ground. You can change everything from the ground up when the need arises, but it is quite happy to work away to a default satisfactory level if you don’t want to bother. Best of all, Greymatter creates static HTML pages whenever new content is added and there is no need for repeated running of CGI scripts.

Greymatter still has a long way to go before it reaches the level of development activity behind Blosxom, but that is partly because it is considered an old fogey in the very trend-conscious world of blogs. However, what it lacks in vitality, it makes up for in its robustness. From the first moment you run Greymatter it feels mature and stable. So maybe it should come as no surprise that a search on Google for the ubiquitous “powered by …” line produces the following number of results.

“powered by blosxom” 40,000
“powered by movabletype” 71,900
“powered by greymatter” 199,000

Greymatter’s age and its system of generating permanent static pages might have something to do with the large number of search engine hits, but it is good to know that a good piece of code has not faded into oblivion. While Blosxom remains a good choice, and something I might consider in the future if I simply must have any of its extra features, at the moment Greymatter is the perfect system for my needs.
:satisfied:

The ghost of Blender past

I am not a rank newcomer to the world of 3D graphics. In fact you could say it is the one field I have continued to try my hand at since my first association with computers. Like many today my fascination with computer graphics began with the Amiga. I too have spent countless hours rendering reflective spheres on checkered floors on my A500 with 1MB RAM. Back then my weapon of choice was Real 3D. When I moved to the PC I started playing around with POV Ray which I had heard of on the Amiga, and I created some pretty decent images in spite of text interface. I also dabbled in Bryce v2 and Poser v1 courtesy some Computer Arts cover discs, and Rhino 3D back when it was still a beta. All this exploration did contribute to my work, proof of which is evident on my old portfolio site.

My plunge into Blender started a few years ago when I came across version 1.8. I was very impressed by its feature list, and also by its small file size. However, the interface was a bit of a challenge. While I could see that it was actually better than the 3D interfaces I had come across before, I just didn’t have the need or inclination to get into it at the time. Since then I have repeated my forays into the software many times. Mostly this involved going through the Juicy Blender Tutorials yet another time (having totally forgotten everything since the last time), and making some half-hearted attempts to complete excellent tutorials (see image). By the way, I whole heartedly recommend the Juicy Blender Tutorials to anyone getting into Blender. It’s a great introduction.

Finally at the beginning of 2003, I used my usual trick to get to know any new software. I forced myself to make the new software a major part of some real-world project with pressing deadlines. In this case it was the complete print identity for an annual architecture conference, which I was working on for the second time in a row.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said “Space is the breath of Art” . I used this quote as a starting point. Also the theme of the conference was ‘architecture in the new millenium’. I needed to use the traditional concept of space and present it in modern way. While I had grandiose ideas of complex architectural 3D renderings, I was not going to learn that about Blender in the short time I had. So, I needed to come up with a simplification of space presented in a modern way. It was when I was having these thoughts about the idea, and looking around for Blender related information on the net that I saw my first image of the ‘Cornell Box‘. This ‘Radiosity’ look was exactly what I had been looking for. It provided a beautiful sense of space with even the most simple models. I played around with radiosity a lot in Blender, mostly trial and error. I tried various kinds of simplified spaces and objects in them, from spheres to weird abstract floating sculptures (see images).

I finally settled on a sphere because it was the perfect foil for the rectangular spaces I was creating, plus I have a soft spot for rendered spheres. It reminded me of the good old days. :rolleyes:
So this was the final image used as a magazine ad, a folder and a large A1 poster.

This has been my journey with Blender to date. I am currently just playing around with the interface, but I think I should be more organized about it and actually work through one of the manuals available on the site. That’s the plan, the results of which are forthcoming.

Why?

As stated in the sub-head at the top of the page, this blog was born with two ends in sight:
1) Complete revamp of my web site
2) Thorough knowledge of Blender

Why revamp the site?

I was pretty proud of my old site (http://samir.shorturl.com/), and I still am. It was coded in raw html in Notepad, it had a distinct visual presence, and it was a very lean and quick piece of coding. However, right from day one this site was outdated in some ways. It was not even a fraction of what I wanted it to be, it was not very extensible, and the it was not the best representation of my work.

So, the site needs help:
– It needs to be more expandable.
– It needs some actual content, beyond pretty pictures.
– The portfolio part could use better presentation.
– The structure should be easy to update.

Why learn Blender?

Let’s see… so many reasons.
I like open source. I like 3D, and computer graphics in general. I like animation and would like to get into it seriously. I love small, free programs that surprise you no end as to what they are capable of. Something as powerful as Blender can not only be immensely useful, but can also save a lot of time in my work as a freelance designer.

For those who have no idea what I am talking about, you can check out this wonderful 3D animation suite at http://www.blender3d.com/

Both these ambitions have been on hold for a couple of years now, and I decided it was about time I tackled and conquered them. But, what will be my incentive to keep with it? That’s where the idea for this blog comes in. On one hand, this will force some regularity into my endeavours. And secondly, what I discover along the way might be of interest to some people. I have experienced a distinct shortage of freely available case-studies on the development of creative projects on the net. This blog will be my small contribution to remedy this situation. I enjoy reading about the thought processes of others and I am sure I am not alone.

With these intentions at heart I set out on my foray into blogging. May the stream of posts come thick and steady.
:satisfied: