These stunning demo reels from Stargate Studios provide a little insight TV/movie production:
Architecture Imaging Silver Screen Urban
[via] Watch this beautiful short film by Alex Roman and prepare to be amazed. The entire film is computer generated, but looks so amazingly life-like that one could easily believe it’s celluloid based. I can hardly wait until computer games are this realistic. The modelling, lighting and ray-tracing are sublime. The film is accompanied by a great soundtrack — which is also an Alex Roman creation. I wonder how long this was in the making?
Disk Hacking Imaging Software Web Browser
Following Jeff Atwood’s recent catastrophe with his Coding Horror website, he asked his readers if anyone could help with or suggest ways in which he might recover the images that had been lost when his web-server’s hard disk went off to its final resting place. One of Atwood’s readers came up with a remarkably elegant and clever way of recovering some of those images from the browser caches of Coding Horror readers (complete with code samples). This is the sort of hack I love: clever, imaginative, effective and single-minded. Awesome stuff.
Another reminder folks that we should all be obsessive about doing our backups and restores.
Graphics Imaging Photography Software Web Design
Transm.js allows you to add programmable image transitions to your web-pages. It uses unobtrusive JavaScript to keep your code clean.
It works in all the major browsers - Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, Safari 2+, Chrome 3+ and IE 6+. Works also on older browsers supporting JS 1.5 and images along with filter or opacity, else it’ll degrade and your visitors won’t notice a thing.
High Performance Imaging Photography Scalability Software Web Browser Web Design
Preloading images is a great way to improve the user experience. When images are preloaded in the browser, the visitor can surf around your site and enjoy faster loading times. This is especially beneficial for photo galleries and other image-heavy sites where you want to deliver the goods as quickly and seamlessly as possible.
Graphics GUI Imaging Photography Software WordPress
An interesting WordPress plugin from Joen Asmussen. I don’t think I’ll employ it at the moment but it’ll be worth keeping an eye on the plugin’s development.
Desktop Wallpaper DWotW Graphics Imaging Photoshop
Desktop Wallpaper of the Week: I love this image. It was created by “h16” and is posted on deviantART. The monochrome to vivid-colour transition between the two girls is extremely well done and the hand-painted effect is simply gorgeous. I can’t decide if the girl on the right is holding a “fantasy” lover, or the ghost of a dead friend or relative perhaps? One of the comments on the deviantArt site suggested that this image represents good meeting evil — but I’m not convinced — there seems to be me to be too much passion between the two girls for this to be a meeting of such polar opposites.
Either way, it’s a gorgeous piece of art and makes a fantastic desktop wallpaper.
You can download the full-size wallpaper from the deviantART website. You should also check out the rest of h16’s work.
Graphics Imaging Open Source Photography Software UM Code Web 2.0 Web Design
Over the past few months I’ve been building up a library of imaging functions that I seem to end up using over-and-over again in my web development projects. On this website alone, I’ve added automatic thumbnailing, grayscale image conversion and CSS Sprite generation to supplement the various iterations of design I’ve been through. This has been especially visible on the recent redesign of the home-page, where imagery became the foundation of the design rather than an adjunct to it.
The imaging library I’ve built has become indispensable to me and, as it’s so very useful, I thought I’d package it up and release it under a GPL so that others can benefit from it too.
Art Desktop Wallpaper Graphics Imaging Photography
Oh yeah babe! I love a great desktop wallpaper and wlogger.com’s got some wonderful offerings.
Changelog Design Graphics Imaging Software Typography Web 2.0 Web Design Weblog WordPress
The paint has now dried on the redesign of the Urban Mainframe’s home-page. The celebrations have begun to diminish and normality is being restored. As the dust settles, I thought I’d write a little about the thought processes behind the design. I’d also like to document a few of the little tricks I’ve employed (because I’m ever so proud of them).
Despite trying various tweaks and reshuffles of 
the previous version of the home-page, I was never totally happy with it. Looking back, I think I tried to convey way too much information on that page, which made it look terribly cluttered. It simply didn’t “feel” right to me. The problem was that I had no idea of how to remodel it, no inspiration.
