I am, of course, talking about the movement as a whole, not various projects. Firefox, GIMP, OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice are just a few examples of some very well loved programs used by people outside the FOSS communities. You don’t have to be “in the know” to find them, nor are they ugly or impossible to learn. But they are also exceptions to the rule, not the rule itself.

The animation pauses, explodes, then spins to show off some of my work. After the videos begin, the After Effects animation shatters, and the balls spin back to resume the Blender animation. The music is royalty free stock techno music.

This is the first draft animation. I plan to re-do the services in Blender then put the two videos together in After Effects. I am not happy with the After Effects shatter effect. Blender can do a more random looking break. I also want to make all of the texts 3D. This took about 3 days time to make, rendering the dferriman.com in Blender took over 3 days with Cycles.

On the bottom, the Environment lighting is turned on otherwise the setup is the same. Looking at the realize provide by Cycles, it is clear that it was worth the extra render time.

I’ve heard this theory before. as early as high school. My art teacher thought that everyone was copying someone. Her favorite example was a car commercial. A guy walks through a museum and sees a car, gets in and drives off. Very original. Then another commercial comes out with another guy looking at the same car, then walks over to another car, gets in it and drives off. Late another commercial comes out where a guy is looking at looking yet another car, this one hanging on the wall. He gets in it and drives off. The idea is that the cars are works of art. But the second and third ads are obviously ripping off the first.

I’ve also read this idea in magazines for the past few years, one designer will make something, everyone will milk it to death, then another artist will make something and the process starts over. So is art dead? Is original design dead?

I think these are questions the art world will fuss over forever. I doubt the argument itself is anything new. The reality is that there will always be two types of artists – those that create and those who copy. There will be some who copy and do a better job that the creator, there will be those that create so well everything else will seem like a knockoff. Everything else will fall in between.

Is this right? Is is wrong? I think the question is leaving out the person that everything may likely get left up to – the client.

Lets be honest, as much as I try to make everything I do as original as possible, I have to sell it to the client. If the client sees something “cool” “trendy” and “hip” they will want it. It is the artist’s job to make it theirs without ripping of the other guy, like it or not. If they can’t, they are not an artist. If they want what’s hot now, and I can’t talk them out of it, I’m going to make the best whatever they want they have seen – while making it as “hot and new” as possible. That’s the job.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not giving the go ahead to steal other people’s ideas. The reality though is that everyone wants what they see working. The question becomes, how do I make this version original and how do I make it likable. I would hope that it is every artist’s dream that we find a client that wants us to make them something that becomes the next big thing in design. But in the end, lets be honest – they want to make a buck, and in reality so do I. Being a starving artist is only cool after we are dead.

I made some robots for the website i needed, but I had to use a PhotoShop-like program to make it look good as the program was just too hard to learn. That was 2004 and every year I would go back to Blender wanting to learn the program, but I would just get lost in the GUI. Sure, with effort I could get small tasks accomplished, but every time was like starting over.

Meanwhile, my friend, now out of school, worked with Maya and 3D Max making video games. Last summer I bought 5 or 6 books on Blender, determined to “get it this time.” He thought I was an idiot. That was Blender 2.49 and I didn’t get it. I started thinking my friend was right – I gave up and looked into getting something else but didn’t (my wife and I had twins, so any budget I had was shot).

Then Blender 2.5 came out.

I bought a 3D magazine and saw an image of Blender that I didn’t recognize. I downloaded the newest release and was blown away – the nightmare GUI was over! I had been working with After Effects for about a month and was loving it, but was bothered by the lack of true 3D for some of the things I needed. I decided to try yet again to learn Blender with a new hope in my heart. I quickly began doing the things with the program I could only dream of before in the first few days.

Blender’s changes from 2.5 and up have revolutionized the program, in my mind. As artists, we grab a hold of what we can learn and use quickly. I didn’t go to college for 3D animation, so I don’t have any more time to learn 3D Max or Maya or whatever than I do Blender, but I can afford Blender. That’s why I kept coming back to it, and my faith in the open source movement has been rewarded.

Computer viruses are a real threat. In fact, you are just as likely to get malware from an email forward as a web address linked in an email. The easiest thing to do to avoid threats to your computer own is to stop using Windows and get a Mac or put a Linux distribution, like Ubuntu, on your computer. However, neither of these are 100% virus proof.

On top of this, Macs are expensive compared to their cheaper PC counterparts and learning a new operating system (Mac or Linux) can be time consuming. The  best way to avoid email threats all together is to get educated. Emails forwarded from friends, or worse strangers, are not the best way or time to learn about email threats.

There are two different common threats: 1. a forward from a friend and 2. an email from a “trusted” company.

Lets first look at an email from a friend, the one in my inbox today. Normally these will say some thing like “There is a virus that was discovered today that McAfee (or Norton, or Microsoft, etc) says is a real threat!” Mine was regarding a Hallmark e-mail “virus.”

To combat this situation, the best course of action would be to go to the legitimate website, Hallmark or McAfee, or a trusted site that has information on the proposed virus, in this case a Hallmark greeting card scam. But before we do, lets take a look at some obvious problems found in this email.

1.“This virus was discovered by McAfee yesterday”

If it was just discovered yesterday, how did it get to you so quickly? Better yet, how did your friend, the one that sent it to you, find out about it? Likely via a forward. This means no one knows how old the information is. It could have been real threat 5 years ago and no longer an issue. This is reminiscent of the email forwards asking for donations to help people – likely children. Some of these emails have been out in the wild so long the “child” should now be an adult with his/her own children.

2.What is the website linked in the email?

Do not click the link to find out, right click on the link and copy the web address. By pasting the address in Google you can learn more without going to the Web site. Don’t click on the links Google spits out at you. Just read the results. Many times you will see what people have to say about the site in the results. If they are a legitimate website, go to the site from Google and try to find the information stated originally in the email.

For the email in the example above, the site is http://www.snopes.com/ and Google says: “The definitive Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation.”  While this seems like an okay website (I actually like Snopes), if information had been from McAfee, the link should have lead to that company’s site.

After finding some clues, keep digging. The website in the link may or may not be reliable, but who is? On this topic, Ask.com has said,

“Try not to confuse hoax warnings with the real thing. Bogus virus alerts often contain links to websites which, at first glance, may seem to confirm the authenticity of the message, but which in fact discuss a completely different matter.” (http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_postcard_virus.htm)

If the greeting is from a friend and you are still worried it is a virus, just call them and they will tell you if they send the email/e-card or not. Bottom line, any email warning you of a scam is just as likely to be a scam, so be careful!

This time the email was safe, but a call to my friend confirmed they blindly sent it out to everyone on their email list.

The other type of email scam is called phishing. This is when an email pretends to be from a known company, like McAfee, e-bay, your bank, etc. When you click on their link it will take you to a dummy site that may look just like the real deal. However, on closer inspection, the web address will look wrong, common words may be misspelled etc.

Rather than click on the link, just go to the company’s Web site on your own. Log in there. You can tell the real site as when you log in it will be secure, like your bank’s log in page. If you look at the URL (the web address at the top of the page) you’ll see “https;//” before the www.mybank.com/. the “s” means the page is secure, and that costs money. Forgeries will not pay for that security. They just hope and expect you not to notice.

Remember, if you are not sure, use Google to see if others are talking about a scam. If you are still not sure call a friend in IT to find out for sure. Slow can mean safer, quick action could lead to quicksand, so be careful!

I used Photoshop to make this, CS4. After messing with the color of the lettering for a while I decided to go against my original green idea and use the color of the text.

I wanted this one to look more light and natural. The yard work was just the ticket to get my mind on something more organic. Yet to me, both seemed rather spiritual in nature.

The background image (the garden) was created by holyknight33, and can be found here.

Like many web designers, I am a Mac user. This is more because Adobe doesn’t make their programs for Ubuntu (a very user friendly Linux flavor) than anything. Yes, I know there are workarounds, but I don’t want to mess with them. Having a Mac also makes it easier to test Safari for Mac users.

Yes, I know there are less Safari users than there are IE, Firefox or even Chrome users these days. However, as more people buy Macs, Safari is the default.

On the most recent website I built for a client, that client was a Mac user. While my direct contact had both Safari and Firefox on his computer, he used both interchangeably. This meant that anything I showed him for approval had to work in either browser. Once I got approval, I could go back and make it work in IE.

This exercise taught me something very valuable – if it works in Safari it will work in Firefox. However, if I made a very simple code error, as far as web standards go, it did not work correctly in Safari – even if it worked in IE.

There it is, I said it – it is easier to code for Safari, and go back to fix IE later than to code for Firefox, Safari is just more web standard compliant.

Yes, Safari users are less than 6%, and I can see why – the browser is just not as usable as its competitors. Firefox has lots of add-ons and even IE has better overall functionality, in my opinion as a user. That said, Safari is the most web compliant.

For the record, testing in Chrome, Google’s upstart that seems to be taking the browsing world by storm, was just as good as testing in Firefox.

I’m sure there are blogs out there that talk about which browser is the most compliant, I remember reading one while back in Linux Format Magazine. However, until you see a practical use, people are just going to use the one they like to brows the web. For me, that is Firefox.

When you are designing/building a website, you want your test browser to just work, because you want to get the job done quickly. My advice, build for Safari, then fix for IE. Firefox and Chrome will be just fine, but you’ll want to test your site in them anyway.

The longest part for me was finding the images, and I’m going to provide them for you now:

Sky: The Sky above us

Girl: If you want to edit the image yourself, grab this one: Sexy Self Shots iPhone+Vanity

If you want to use the one I already edited, grab this one.

We’ll also be using Planet Brushes 2 for the Moon.

And Wings Photoshop brushes.

Before we begin, please download these or find the images/brushes you would like to use.

Starting by creating an image 1200px wide by 500px tall. We’ll add the sky first. You should have downloaded the original size of the image, as the next smallest is too small for our needs.

Open this image and go to Image/Image size make your settings look like this:

Go to Select/All and copy the image. Paste it into your new image, make this layer “Sky.” Use the Move Tool (v) to position it how you like.

Now we’ll create another layer. Click on the “Sky” layer. Go to Layer/New Adjustment Layer/Hue/Saturation. Make sure the “Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask” is checked and press “OK.” This will make a new layer we will use to alter the shy without changing the original image. This will let us play around without losing the master copy.

Set yours up like so:

To re-create some color, lets click on the “Sky” layer and create a new layer. We are going to do the same thing again to leave the maser copy alone, but we are going to create a Color Balance layer. Go to Layer/New Adjustment Layer/Color Balance. Again, make sure the “Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask” is checked before you press “OK.”

Set up your Color Balance like so:

Once you have the one(s) you like, you’ll likely want to delete the unused layers. If you have more than one layer making your Moon and stats, merge them now. Name this layers “Stars.” Change the Opacity to 77%. You’ll want to play with the opacity settings to make sure it’s the way you like it. If you go with the direction exactly as you see them here, your results should look like this:

Now we’ll add our iPhone angel. Open the Sexy Self Shots iPhone+Vanity image (or the image you selected).

There are a few problems with using an image from Flickr. It may be free and legal to use, but these images are not always the best quality. Even when they quality is very good, the image may not be exactly what you are looking for. This is not really a tutorial about removing close or fixing images, so I’m just going to go over some basics.

The easy way:

There are a few ways to get the image. If you want to do it quick and dirty, use the pen tool to cut out the girl, cutting off the arm with the iPhone (unless you’re making a heavenly iPhone ad). You’ll want to feather the selection about 1.5px. This should help insure that she doesn’t look choppy.

Looking at the image, the top of the head looks flat. Being a painter, I found it more natural to use the smudge tool to fix this. By “brushing” the hair, I was able to make a nice, natural looking round head.

Also, angels don’t wear purple panties. An easy fix would be to follow the curves of her body smudging above and below the panties (one brush above, on below until it done done), but that looks cheap.

A better way:

Another way, and a better way albeit more time consuming, would be to create a layer above the image and color in the area with the girl white. You can then create a mask to remove the girl from the image.

Create a new image 200X450 and paste her there so we can edit the picture. You can also use the clone tool to remove the underwear, then use the blur and smudge tool to correct the image. I was then able to use existing shadows and highlights to create lines of shadows that belonged on her body.

The hair can still be fixed using the smudge tool and mentioned above.

The simplest way:

Feel free to use this and continue tweaking it if you like, just be sure to give credit back to the original artist per the license agreement. (Just right click or command+click on a Mac to copy or download the image.)

Copy the image and add it as the top layer on our image. we’ll call this layer “Girl.”

With this layer selected, go to Layer/New Adjustment Layer/Hue/Bright/Contrast. Make sure the “Use Previous Layer to Create Clipping Mask” is checked and press “OK.” Set up your Brightness and Contrst like so:

Place the left wing in the “Wing Left” layer and the right wing in the “Wing Right” layer. Be sure that the foreground color is set to white.

There are many different wings you can use. I used the same wing for both, as this worked best for the way she was standing.

After adding the wings, make another layer to draw over the wings, to give the depth. Using a white brush, add lines where ever you see they are needed. With the wings I used, I had to draw in the top line to make the wings look more a part of the girl.

If you used the same images and followed every thing correctly, you image should now look like this: