Leaves and Menus
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 7.06.07I haven’t had much to post lately, as work has mostly involved render wrangling, file management, and tedious compositing, and… I have no life. Not the most interesting blog subjects, but I’ve also gotten to do some texturing lately. A couple leaf sets with the basic colour, bump, translucency, and cutout masks. Oh, and some texture variations for top / bottom colouration.
It seems easiest to start in Illustrator (much like the ferns) to design the basic shapes and vein patterns (art brush strokes can really save the day), then take it into Photoshop for loads of blurring, layering, overlaying, and effects. The sample renders (grabbed from longer test animations) used simple flat polygons in Lightwave… hopefully, the textures will work well for full size trees while keeping poly counts low.
Oh, and there have been a few updates to the site. Amidst a flurry of complaints (well, one guy… but I agreed with him) regarding the fickle operation of my previous site navigation setup, I’ve mussed around with the javascript a bit. Try clicking instead of rolling over the section title to expand the content; it should be quite a bit more consistent and reliable than before. Let me know if you think it’s an improvement or not. I also updated my LiteBox installation to be a little more… polished. It’s black now, and proudly wears new buttons and a loading animation. Slick, no?
mediaboxAdvanced
The newly styled Litebox has been replaced by a similarly modified Slimbox installation. I've moved all my javascript code over to the latest MooTools release and consolidated as much as possible. There should be fewer files to wade through on page load, though I'm still distrustful of interaction speed. FireFox kinda dies when there's QT content on the page, but Safari seems to be really loving the updates. Let me know if you come across any problems.