Hey,

Here is the (nearly) front page interface for the personal website I
currently run on Redbrick's server (Redbrick is the name of the networking
society in Dublin City University, Ireland, which I attend). The sphere sits
inert (big pic) until the user moves their mouse over one of the four
visible quadrants. The quadrant under the mouse then lights up (small pic),
and the user can click on it to be taken to one of the four main sections of
the site.

The sphere was modelled in Rhino, and imported into Moray, from which
texturing and rendering was done. There was a bit of post production in
Photoshop, to put the sphere onto a flat background colour, to clean up
some bad geometry around the bevelled edges of the sphere, to add the colour
sections (see below), and to add the glow on the ground of the bottom two
sections. The final render was at 800x600 resolution, and the version on the
web is just a cropped (not scaled) version of this.

I did run into a strange problem though. I had initially intended to change
the colour of each quadrant to its lit up colour, and then render that
subsection of the image instead of rendering the whole image, just to save
me some time. However, when I imported the small rendered section of the
image and tried to match it up with the full render of the inert sphere, the
two pieces didn't match up. The full renderer was fine, but the sphere was
distorted in the small section - it had an oval profile instead of a proper
sphere...

That one page of the site that has the sphere on it is a total download of
nearly one meg (big problem, but it is the high-bandwidth index, there is a
low bandwidth index as well). The site is down at the moment (I ran out of
space in my account, and so the site is currently down), but when it's back
up, you can check it out if you like:

    http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~element

BTW, from now on, I'll be posting to this group as element (just so you know
who I am ;) )

Equiprawn
(AKA Element)

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'sphere.jpg' (37 KB) Download 'spheredemo.jpg' (19 KB)

Preview of image 'sphere.jpg'

Preview of image 'spheredemo.jpg'