Jessica Simpson was the second victim, what do you guys think? I think my Angelina Jolie one turned out better though. I’m still trying to experiment with masking, filters and just playing with different layers and textures. Hopefully my third attempt will turn out better than my first. One thing I like about this one is her white hair, inspired by Rogue from X-Men.
Next victim is Britney Spears. (Evil smile)
I stumbled upon this great CG by Vincent chai of Digital Animation Herts Uni UK. After watching it, I’m pretty sure to say that, the 4.5 minutes of my precious was NOT wasted.
It is a fight between a classic American fighter/bomber jet and a Japanese tank. The surprising part is they are actually transformable into robots (rather not call them Transformers). The animations are fluid with high definition graphics. I haven’t seen anything this good for a while. Vincent Chai is simply a great talented CG artist!
The movie clip here is standard definition, you want watch the high definition version on his site.
World War – 3D Animation @ University Of Hertfordshire 2008 from Digital Animation Herts Uni UK on Vimeo.
After following Steel Frog‘s Photoshop tutorial called Dark Art that teaches you ways of creating freakish looking eye ball. The instructions are very clear and to the point even I found it easy to follow since I’m still a Photoshop beginner.
I created a quarter of Angelina’s face when I followed the tutorial a few days ago. Today I have alienized the entire face of Angelina Jolie with a some subtle changes plus a major skin texture change. At first I was planning to use the “blood veinish” texture on the lips only. And ended up pretty good on the entire face as well. I have also toned down the color of the eyes to make them look a bit more blend in to the rest of the face. Finally I have also changed the three “space scars” on her face with a different layer option called vivid light instead of pin light. Again experimenting with other options sometimes can end up with positive surprises.
Here is the pictures of my quarter face:
And the entire face: [click to enlarge]
Looking back these years playing Second life, an online virtual reality game. Friends come and go, though I’ve gained a few more friends who initially were my customers. The only thing that is missing in my second life is I need to socialize more, I have to admit it plays a huge part in the game. That is also one reason why I don’t have too many friends in there. All I did and still am doing is login, build and logoff. By build, I mean building houses, stores, malls and bunkers you name them. I really love building in SL, because it allows me to release my imaginations through the use of software tools.
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When I first started with no money, I didn’t have my own land and thus I didn’t have my own store. I had to rent from someone. The place was called Mobius Village, it drew my attention because my avatar name is Mobius Hashimoto, so it meant something to me. Not sure if it still exist though. Also the rent there was resonable so I had my little store there for about half a year or so. Then I found another place called Armory Island which, as you can guess, sells military related products and is the biggest place for your military needs. There is no rent but AI charges a 25% commission, which is somewhat steep. But with the traffic there, I thought it was worth it and its also good for exposing my products to more people. About a year had passed, my business was stable enough that it would cover the monthly land ownership fee as well as the premium membership fee. I decided, with the help of some friends, to buy my very own piece of land, its a 4096 sq feet of space, which was and still is more than enough to build a relatively spacious store. You have no idea what the feeling was like to own your first piece of virtual land!
So here I am, still building things and running my little business. Although I don’t build as much as I used to, my passion for building and this game overall is still as strong. Lately I’m just occupied with other things that I haven’t built for months until now.
If you are into virtual reality type of games. You should definitely give Second life a try. It is free so you have nothing to lose other than some of our first life. 
There are just many fun things to do there like clubbing/partying, building like me, or just socialize with others and play many different types of interesting mini games that are built by others in Second Life.
Time flies, its already been 2 years since I’ve joined Second Life. So I have decided to design and build a 2 year anniversary prefab. As usual, I tried different ideas and came up with this. Hope you guys like it!
Mobius
I first heard of Adobe Flex from a friend through MSN chat. He told me it is one of many RIA technologies out there like Microsoft Silverlight, AJAX and JavaFX. Then it was during a team meeting my co workers started talking about Web 2.0, avatars and RIA. Since then, the words Adobe Flex have been stuck in my head so I have decided to take a look myself.
Adobe provides a getting started guide with Flex 3, the current version of Flex which you can take a look here. It covers from building a basic application to a more advanced application. And by the way, you need to get a copy of the SDK (software development kit) in order to compile the xml-based MXML source code into SWF file (basically Flex creates Flash content just like any other Flash contents you see on the net).
I won’t go too technical just like my other blogs as this is intended to be a overview. But I will write about the pros and cons.
Pros:
Cons:
I love Flex so much I have decided to redesign my site using it as well, its not done yet but you should get the idea
Project Mobius
As usual any comments/feedbacks are welcome and I hope you enjoy this review!
webtechreview
This is my first blog and first product review, I have put in a a lot of efforts into writing this. Ok, let’s get to the point.
For your information, I have been a web/graphic designer for more than 10 years, I am not saying I’m a professional (skill wise) but I can say I know enough to judge that this Web Design Mastery is a good read for those wanting to know more about web design, promoting your own website, whether for business or personal purpose.
From the site it shows you the topics that are covered extensively in 8 volumes. If you are really interested, you can just go straight to signing up for a free trial which contains 77 pages of the full 500+ page ebook and no I don’t gain anything from anyone by signing up for the trail version ebook and that’s not why I’m here.
I got myself a copy of the trail ebook by signing up on the site, you can unsubscribe from the list once you receive a link to download the trail ebook through email (note if you are using yahoo or hotmail accounts, the email will most likely be in your junk mail folder). By the way its in a form of PDF, you will need Acrobat Reader in order to view it, you can get it here.
I have read through the content and honestly, even for a trial version, it covers a lot of the concepts and ideas of how to plan, create and promote your website. I am not going in details about the content, if you are still reading and interested, try it out yourself But there are a few key points that I should point out:
If you made it all the way down here, I am really happy because my blog was worth reading. It means a lot to me if you could leave me feedback as well, even the negative ones please as I want to improve and get better at blogging. Finally, if you are truly interested about web design, get yourself the trial copy now and start making that site that you have always dreamt of making. It is also rewarding to see your own creation for the first time. I hope I have enlightened you a bit about web design (I used these two words so much I know!)
Feel free to check out my site!
Project Mobius
Thank you for reading and I will continue to try my best to produce quality reviews!
Webtechreview
