Monday, 25 February 2013

3D modeling in 3ds max

today i have been doing 3D modelling using the software 3ds max. i have created a table in the program by adding different shapes to it to make a table top by making a rectangle and changing the measurements of the height width and sides. i also created table legs using cylinders  i also put textures into it to make it actually look like a table and i also added lights.

a look at what i was doing in the Program:

and a 'render of what i would look like:


Monday, 11 February 2013

web animation - What you need to know

E-Zine
Web Animation, What you need to know
More and more users of the internet expect increasingly more dynamic, visually engaging and media rich content. This can be achieved by designers in the form of vector based animations. Animations of this type can be scaled up or down to any size easily to adjust to different screen resolutions, from mobile phones to the highest end computer monitors. These animations are also relatively small in file sizes and can be streamed across the internet from super quick fibre optic broadband cables to the not as fast dial up modem connections. All internet users have a way of downloading video streaming software onto their computers, for example Adobe Flash player, 11 which is software that can be downloaded on almost every device or QuickTime player, which also works on pretty much any device. Software like adobe flash player and quick time are what makes being able to see these vector animations possible. These characteristics make vector animations a popular choice for web designers and the designing of these sites has created a huge and thriving sector of the interactive media industry.

This article will hopefully give you an understanding of web animations. This will cover digital animation methods and the use of animation on web applications. The web application that I will be focusing on the most is the web banner.

Animation types and methods
In such a short amount of time there has already been a variety of different types of web animations from simple to complex. The four main types of web animation are:
1.     
  Animated GIF s
2.    
   Dynamic HTML
3.      
Shockwave and flash (vector animations)

How web animations stated off

GIF animations

GIF animations are one of the biggest innovations of the internet and the dawn of web animations. A GIF animation is composed of a series of Bitmap images which are played in a sequence. The main advantage of this type of animation is that the file format is recognised by most, if not all internet browsers. The disadvantage of this kind of animation is in order to keep the file sizes down; the animation is usually short as each frame is a bitmap image and bitmap images can be quite large in size. This sort of animation was the first kind of web animation to catch on and is still widely used today.

Dynamic HTML

Dynamic HTML animation was not created with animation in mind, but will let you edit html elements in a way that will add movement to a web page. DHTML works on the principal that instead of having individual frames of animation, you tell your computer to take a static image and move it across the screen, similar to the way a computer mouse cursor moves across the screen.  Dynamic HTML content is produced using a number of complex scripting languages, for example Java or Action script that can access the Document Object Module in your internet browser, which controls everything about how an internet browser displays a web page. This kind of animation is recognized by all internet browsers so there is no need to download extra software; however it is more complex than other types of animation as the coding for it is quite difficult.

Plugins

As multimedia content became more available on the web, so were the ways of being able to display them. Instead of changing an internet browser to recognise and display these forms of content, web designers created plugins that everybody could then download and use. Plugins are programs which work with your browser to read and play a particular kind of file. They are relatively small pieces of software, so it doesn’t take you forever to download them off of the internet. They are specifically designed to work with a particular type of file, so that they can accomplish a lot of things that an ordinary browser cannot.

Flash and shockwave

Flash is now the standard format that is used for rich media animations on the web and shockwave is now a very popular format for presenting more complex animated content. Unlike Real Player and Quick Time files, slash and shockwave movies actually appear as a part of the webpage and include a high level of interactivity, similar to a simple html page. The shock wave player then not only plays the animation, but recognizes user input and then controls how the browser responds.
Flash and shock wave are not the only formats for this sort of animation, but flash and shock has caught on more than other similar formats.

Difference between flash and shockwave

Flash and shockwave software applications are very similar and were produced by Macromedia, now Adobe, but there are some differences between the two. Most of them are related to the origins of the file types.
Director, the software application that is used to create shockwave files has been around for a long time and was originally developed to create dynamic content for CD-ROMs and still is today. As dynamic content became more in demand on the web, updated versions of the software became more oriented toward making content on the web

About ‘rich media’
To describe rich media, it helps to think about other ad formats that we're all familiar with, starting with the simplest: text ads. With just a few keystrokes, anyone can create simple messages in a standardized format, and place them on a site like Google.com in minutes. Then we have standard display ads, ads that usually include text with a visual such as a logo or a graphic. These can be in formats we're all familiar with like .jpg, .gif, .swf and more. Standard display ads can either be static or animated with tools like Flash. They typically have only one interaction, meaning that when you click on them, you'll be taken to a destination site. And then at the most complex level, from a design and interaction perspective, we have rich media ads. With rich media, you can have ads that expand when users click or roll over, for example, and there are extensive possibilities for interactive content, such as HD video or even the ability to click to make a phone call.

But making a rich media ad possible requires much more complex technology to ensure that all of the ad behaviours function properly, that all of the interactions can be measured, and to serve the ads onto web pages. Every piece of the canvas, from the video play button to the button that allows for expansion, requires coding in Flash that's made possible by a rich media technology provider like DoubleClick Rich Media. With all of this complexity, there's also a lot of room for error. So in addition to enabling the development of the ads, tools like DoubleClick Studio provide quality analysis and preview functionalities to make sure that the ads work the way they should.