thedude.com » Computing

Hovercards are Cool

thedude — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 23:42:29 +0000

I know I’ve metioned Gravatars before and told you how cool they are. Having your own Globally Recognized Avatar is very cool. It puts a face to the commenter on numerous blogs and other social media sites. Avatars can be associated with e-mail addresses, so you can have a nice G-rated professional-looking shot for comments on your company wiki and a different image to adorn comments you leave on thedude.com.

Now the folks at gravatar.com have made Gravatars even cooler. When used with a plugin that enables Hovercards, you can get to know more about the commenter by simply hovering over their avatar. If your gravatar.com profile includes links, and a few images, they appear here. Check out this entry’s comment section to see it in action!

By the way, in case you never noticed, hovering over any of the images on this site often reveals a little extra detail about the shot. :)

Buglady Logo

thedude — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:45:23 +0000

The original 2D artwork was created by Andrew. I merely “pulled up a Z” and rendered it in Cinema4D.

Chip Load Animation Test

thedude — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 22:53:24 +0000

Swipe your pointing device left and right over the image.

The animation’s not perfect. This is just a test. Overall, I’m quite pleased with the results.

First Photo Event After PhotoShop World

thedude — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 02:42:27 +0000

I attended my first-ever PhotoShop World in Las Vegas last week, and all things considered, I would give the event a thumbs-up. After recovering from the shock of the most expensive martini ever, and a corny, but slick keynote, the classes turned out to be worth the price. I attended 7 or 8 classes, where I learned a lot. Much of what I learned was often not even the main topic of the class. I paid close attention to the techniques used by the mostly excellent – sometimes outstanding instructors – and several times heard myself say, “I never knew you could do that! Wait – you can simply drag the drop shadow when you apply it?? Wow! I never knew that!!”

Now, as a result of what I saw at the show, I will definitely be switching to Adobe Lightroom for printing and possibly much more, and I’ll certainly need one of these awesome lighting devices and a couple of these to go with it. Show sponsors should be happy. A couple of other very cool things I saw at the show were the super-quality photo books by Miller, and the mind-blowing aluminum prints from Metal Mural and Image Wizards. I also learned that I can rent virtually any camera gear known to man or woman with a few mouse clicks from borrowlenses.com. Next time I want to play with a $10,000 lens for the weekend, I’ll know where to go. And they’ll FedEx it directly to my door.

So, less than three hours after returning, I was at the grand opening of the new covered arena at Xenophon, trying out new techniques. Getting results like these adds time to my workflow and greatly increases file sizes, but it seems to be worth it. My wife is certainly happy about the glow-y softening technique used in some of the shots above.

The Chip is the Machine

thedude — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 03:41:53 +0000

Practicing with materials and lighting. Fun! I think I may I need to try to render something that could not exist. Hm…

thedude Meets The Man

thedude — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 23:20:07 +0000

I’m very lucky to be involved with the design and rendering of the 2012 Burning Man. I can’t show you the rest yet, but soon after this year’s Man burns, I’ll share more.

Another PGM Rendering

thedude — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 15:59:41 +0000

Most of you have noticed that I haven’t been posting a lot lately. The main reason for this is that I am so busy at work. When I’m not tending to IT tasks, I use every spare cycle rendering one thing or another. I really love doing this work, but it consumes a lot of time I might otherwise spend blogging. Sorry!

This latest rendering of the Ion Torrent Personal Genome Machine will be used in a very cool brochure. The image will stretch from the front to the back of an 11 x 17″ brochure. Woo-hoo!

Rendered with the fabulous Thea Reneder.

The Lobby With Lighter Colors

thedude — Sat, 21 May 2011 02:39:05 +0000

I’ve actually started a blog for my neighbors to gather opinions about possible color schemes for our remodel. Here’s another of several examples.

After I rendered this one, I realized that there is a light leak from the right. The small amount of light leaking in from the blue sky accounts for the green tint in the shadow areas of the walls and the blue tint on the dark side of the pillars.

Oops! Still learning.

Pratt & Whitney Engine

thedude — Thu, 19 May 2011 00:51:32 +0000

Another Thea Render from a freely downloaded SketchUp model. Wow!

Mo’ Rendering

thedude — Wed, 18 May 2011 19:11:42 +0000

I’m having so much fun learning SketchUp and Thea Render!

Looking for excuses to create 3D objects, I decided to create a model of the public areas in our building. This could come in very handy, as we are currently working with a designer on updating the 80′s design. This is our building’s lobby with new colors applied.