Posted by Admiral on 2010-02-21 17:21:32

About 5 months ago, I started work on a collaborative work with an artist friend of mine, Trent Call. This model did not take me 5 months worth of work; it took more along the lines of 16.5 hours to create start to finish, but due to unusual amounts of chaos in my life over the last little while, I've only been able to sit down and complete it as the dust from recent explosions is starting to settle.

I had a great deal of fun working on the model, from it's Candy-Corn nose, all the way down to it's Mickey Mouse style gloves. The Shoelaces were a pain in the butt though. Trent's Devil Guy is a recurring 1920s style cartoon character that shows up in Trent's works from time to time. If you're lucky, you might see this chatacter in some of Trent's mural pieces, painted on various walls and truck sides around the city. You may even have caught him in passing at several gallery strolls, if you have been to any downtown showings over the last few years.

Below is a series of "Work in Progress" screenshots I took as I worked on this model. Click on each of the thumbnail images to see the full resolution screenshot.

Tags: 3d model | beta | blender | trent call

Posted by Admiral on 2010-02-05 01:32:55

For the longest time, I've been trying to figure out just how exactly to center elements on a page using only CSS properties, and without having to use an HTML 4.01 transitional DTD and telling a table to be 100% wide and 100% tall, aligning it's contents to center, then valigning them to middle. I think I've finally found a way to do it.

Tonight, I stumbled across a really nifty little trick that Safari uses to center lone multimedia elements on pages. Safari does this when you visit links to MP3s or other Quicktime readable multimedia across the web, and the destination ends up being a browser window rather than a forced download. I discovered this when I right clicked on the background of one such page and selected the "Inspect Element" contextual menu item.

If you use Safari and don't have the "Inspect Element" contextual menu option available when you right click inside a page, you probably need to go to the "Advanced" tab in your Safari preferences and click the "Show Develop menu in menu bar" checkbox. FireFox users can get a similar functionality by installing FireBug, which is, for the record, totally the sweetest Javascript debugger around. That I have used. To date.

Anyway, here's a basically what's happening above:

<style> .center{ margin: auto; position: absolute; top: 0px; bottom: 0px; left: 0px; right: 0px; } </style> <img src="some_image.png" class="center">

You can view a quick demo of this sweet trick in action on a quick little page I wrote up to test this, and download a copy of the source for the trick and play with it yourself.

Please keep in mind that this trick only works in the good browsers, and not in the bad browsers. Screenshots were provided by Adobe BrowserLab.

Remember kids, the sooner we can get all of our families and friends using one of "The GOOD browsers", the sooner IE will loose its market share, and the sooner we can to stop catering to Microsoft's inadequacies.

Tags: css | explorer sucks | html5 | webdesign