Leith B&W Series-4
Originally uploaded by Rick Stirling.
Whilst off, I took the camera to Leith docks again, even though I felt that I had totally exhausted that area. I used a neutral density filter to add some darkness into the scene and shot in black and white all afternoon.
I wish that Adobe Lightroom had a good facility to add film grain to images, at the moment I have to export them to Photoshop to add that.
There are a few issues to deal with - the transparent .png files don’t work in IE6, which 17% of my visitors still use. While I’d love to do my part to help kill off that browser, instead I’ll have to fix that. I’ve implemented a quick javascript fix, but i suspect I’l have to convert some of the .png files to .gif.
My biggest issue seems to be getting Wordpress commands to run inside Posts - this was working prior to upgrading Wordpress a few weeks ago, and means that at the minute my custom links and content pages are pretty much useless. Hopefully I’ll get this sorted fairly quickly.
Edit: All the content seems to now be working, and I’ve uploaded .gif versions of some images to hopefully sort out the IE6 issues.
I had thought that the redesign of RSArt would be a simple affair - it was time for a refresh and I wanted to move away from the clean interface to something with a little more grunge and character.
After collecting dozens of reference images and working through several iterations of the design (I’m on my 4th or 5th deviation and looks nothing like the original designs from a month ago apart from having red in it), it’s close to final.
Moving from Photoshop to an HTML/CSS design however brings many flaws of the design to light. I had concentrated on the big design blocks such as the header, backgrounds etc., but I had neglected the micro details such as formatting the post titles and dates. Separating comments. Just what to have in the sidebar.
All these little niggly aspects need to be ironed out before I upload.
Oh, Forbidden Planet is selling World War Hulk for £17, Amazon has it for £11.
Yesterday I finally moved from Photoshop and procrastination to the HTML and CSS stage of the RSArt redesign.
It’s going fairly well, I have the basic sections all working on my local install of Wordpress (using MAMP on the Mac; it set up Apache and the databases for me). Now I just have finish formatting the text.
I’ll get around to installing a load of rubbish on it, swearing at Linux, then reverting it back to a base install with 1 week*.
*Edit: 2 days.
Do we re-invent the wheel? No, but we might refine it.
You wouldn’t build a pair of hands if you had built a perfectly good set with nice UV co-ordinates a week before, would you? No, that would be waste of time. If you had build a chunky pair of male hands and wanted a more slender pair for an elegant female model you’d simply slim them down or elongate the fingers.
Re-use, re-work and recycle.
As you build models you are essentially building your own library of resuable assets which you should recycle over multiple models and even multiple projects (legal issues aside). If you picked up the excellent D’Artiste Character Book 2, (the Gears of War one), you’ll see how they reuse not only vast chunks of models - legs, heads etc, but smaller parts like fingers, noses, teeth, buckles, buttons, insignia. When you are in a production environment it is much better use of your time to grab existing elements and integrate them into your newest work, and spend the time you saved on polishing it instead.
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