Topic awaiting preservation: Desert Dawn (Page 2 of 2)

Well... with great power comes great responsibility. I know. It said so in that Spiderman movie.

Honestly, I don't mind at all. I'm a Psychotic, which means I've got moderating options for this 'BIG SIG' forum, and that's enough for me. I just about live on this part of the forums, and help as well as I can.

Being a moderator is way overrated anyway (which reminds me, I still gotta take care of some old threads) Some time in the past there was a great fuss about persons questioning the mods and others wanting moderating options as well, and that got so far out of hand that Doc de-modded everyone.
I know you say this with the best intentions, but I think it's good this way.

quote:

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When you make a selection the drawing tools you use will only affect the pixels in the selection, so you have to worry less about bleeding.

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That was some of the best advise I've had about pixel stuff! Thnanx

Later,

C:\


~Binary is best~

Just have to pop here!

The only thing poking my eye in your sig, is the lack of desert **wideness** .
All the rest is magnific.

I could be wrong, but how about adding 20-30px on the left, inside the frame?
(Extention of the frame is a better frase.)
Or even more?
Untill you get the sence of breathtaking, everlasting desert.

How ever you do, the sig is still dandy cool!



[This message has been edited by FLAMEhorse (edited 03-22-2003).]

great sig mahjqa!

[edit- fix spelling...

[This message has been edited by velvetrose (edited 03-23-2003).]

I've always liked Mahjqa's signatures. They've always been inspiring.

Heilige scheisse, Human Shield, where the hell have YOU been? Have I completely missed your recent posts, or did you just recently start using your old sig again? Any case, thanks for the comments.

And for inspiring, they're all simple there because I was inspired by something. Some poster I saw, a movie, a piece of music.. I'm glad I can inspire others because of that.

I don't want to stray off-topic, but:

a. short answer - I've been around... busy... contemplating stuff... not getting much design stuff done.

b. long answer - Adobe cancelled the LiveMotion project right after we shipped LiveMotion 2. They felt that Macromedia's control of the Flash code meant we'd always be one step behind, and apparently they felt it was better to not even be in the race than to be second place to Macromedia. Even cancelled, we were one of only two products to make our numbers that quarter, the other being Photoshop naturally. Anyway, most of the staff got laid off. I do QA work for a medical software company and keep in touch with my friends at Adobe. They're working on a DVD design product now using the LiveMotion engine.

Okay, back on topic: So what was it that inspired you for this one, Mahjqa? Lawrence of Arabia? Aladdin? Thief of Baghdad? I like the outline of light. It has such a more dramatic effect than an outline of shadow.

Well, what I started out with was a (very dark) landscape with some mountains in the background. I intended it to be some view you might see in Scotland, with lots of green. When I thought of Scotland I figured I'd add some mist to the full picture, and added several animated clouds. As I said earlier, I almost always work in greyscale (no colors whatsoever) and add colors later. After I had the clouds moving convincingly, I added a hue/saturation adjustment layer on top. After a bit of fiddling I scooted the slider to yellow, and for some reason it reminded me more of a desert scene than anything else. Along with the fact that the green hills of Scotland don't really match with the forum's colors, I decided to go with the desert theme. I still had some images lying around with castle parts (walls, towers and so on) and with a little tweaking gave them a bit of an 'eastern' feel to it. At some point before that I had added the sun and it's rays, and tweaked all the hue/saturation layers (you may notice that it goes from yellow, over to orange and pink, to deep purple... maybe not entirely realistic, but definately adding to the athmosphere.

At that point I made this thread and showed the first version, it had some siple borders, mainly because I couldn't figure out how to do the transparency correctly without making the filesize too big. In the end it was Moth who suggested to add a border as if one was looking through a window at the scene. After making the window I found that the left size was a little empty, so I added the web and the Lamp. A bit lacking in originality, maybe, but it was the best I could come up with, and in the end I'm very pleased with the shinyness and general appearance of it.

Phew, well, that was it in short.

So sorry to hear about the loss of you job, working at Adobe must've been great... but what does that 'q&a' stuff mean? are you working at a helpdesk? (please excuse my ignorance )

edit; don't worry about going offtopic, I believe most that can be said about the sig has been said.



[This message has been edited by mahjqa (edited 03-26-2003).]

welcome back HumanShield! i've missed your commentary, though i was mostly lurking whilst you were active

Thanks, Velvet.

Many confuse QA for Q&A.

Q&A = Question and Answer... like tech support I guess.

What I do is

QA = Quality Assurance. That's testing the product to make sure it is up to acceptable standards.

Thats amazing.... how did you make the smoke or "mist" like that? .... just using the cloud filter?

I believe he used the clouds filter. If you look in the FAQs and search for fire, you will see the basic technique.

do the transparency correctly without making the filesize too big.

This touches on something I've often wondered about. Why does making an animated sig transparent often increase the file size? It seems to me that with less pixels the file should be smaller.

Moth; Take a look at this page, it's under the header 'D. Use "super compression" - redundant pixel removal.'

What it basically does, is when an animation changes in a frame, the *.gif exporter only takes the pixels that are changed. For example in my desert sig; the upper sky doesn't change. What basically happens is that the first frame of the animation contains the full picture, and in the next frame only the part that has changed. the pixels that are unchanged are transparent in the second frame. A problem with this is that it's unusable if pixels become transparent in the next frame. Since the 'transparent' pixels are already in use to indicate that the picture doesn't change, it's impossible to use that technique.

Thank you! I bookmarked the page you provided. Nice entry in the contest, by the way.