Graphics Gallery

09 February 2011

One of my hobbies over the past years has been as a graphics artist which has come in handy for web developement. Most of images I've made have been created by myself from scratch using the combined program Corel Draw v4.0, Corel Photo Paint v4.0, and TrueSpace v2.0. For those unfamiliar with these programs, a brief description of each can be found just below...followed by some of of my 'better' pictures, mostly being 3D TrueSpace renders.

1. Graphics Software
2. Picture Gallery
3. Banner Gallery

Description of Graphics Software Used

COREL DRAW v4.0

Corel Draw is an easy to use 2D CAD program. All kinds of neat stuff like basic 3D extrusions, fractal fills, etc... I recommend this tool for a beginner to intermediate graphic artist. Corel Draw is an indespensible tool for creating 2D objects to import into TrueSpace (as DXF's) and extrude into full 3D. Also, the many wonderful fractal fills allow quick and easy creation of textures and bump maps to use in TrueSpace. Corel v3.0 can be bought for around than 100$ or so these days (although v3.0 doesn't have fractal fills) and v4.0 I'm sure is close to 200$. Relatively cheap considering how great it is to use. (no...I don't work for Corel...:)

COREL PHOTO PAINT v4.0

Photo Paint is a simple, easy to use paint program. It has alot of nice tools, but it has many short comings. I would only recommend this for the beginner graphical artist or only to do quick and simple jobs. I use this mainly to convert rendered TGAs to JPGs and for small touch ups (like smoothing shadows).

TRUESPACE v2.0

Truespace is a simple 3D modeller which includes features found in most 3D modelling packages although it has slower rendering than most others. It has simple, on the fly, 3D modelling via 3DR (Intels new 3D modelling library for Windows) and a 32Bit OS (ie, Windows NT, Win95,or Windows with Win32S). I think it is a very good program and would especially reccommend it for the user new to 3D modelling (in 2 days I was creating 'nice' pictures...very easy).

Picture Gallery

Image	Description
CARD2.JPG, 74kb ( 19 September 1999 )	A card design for someone's birthday.
CARD1.JPG, 44kb ( 19 September 1999 )	Design for general card front.
TAMRIEL.JPG, 17kb ( 19 September 1999 )	Logo for my the World of Tamriel section on my website.
ESPMOR.JPG, 10kb ( 19 September 1999 )	Logo for my the Morrowind section on my website.
ESPLOGO.JPG, 11kb ( 19 September 1999 )	Logo for my website, the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.
CAKE.JPG, 81kb ( 19 September 1999 )	Cake model made for someone's birthday card.
BADMIN2.JPG, 20kb	Simple logo done for my old badminton club.
COMP.JPG, 8kb	A render of a small room with a mirror, lamp, computer, and window. Done just for fun.
DAVE1A.JPG, 27kb	Just a picture done to put on my door (for fun again). I used alot of previous bits of scenes to compile this one (like the spritre cans, computer, lamp, etc...). The books are all the same, just rescaled with different colors (yah...so I'm lazy ok).
GUITAR.JPG 20kb	I did this one in an afternoon while I was bored (I saw my guitar sitting there and said...hey, that would be fun to model). I rendered a much better one (higher res, better angle, better light, etc...), but apparently my computer ate it (my main drive crashed in January...thank God for backups at least..:)
HJMAPB.JPG 46kn	A forest/river side scene done for Superb Entertainments WWW pages. I'm rather proud of the trees (done from scratch and modified many...many times) which are simple a bunch of planes glued to a cone (trunk) with a pine-leaf texture and bump map applied to them...giving the appearance of far more detail than the scene actually contains (over 2Mb scene file already). The trees since this render have been improved somewhat...
HJMAPBW.JPG 66kb	Same scene as the previous one, except modified for a winter scene. This was relatively easy to do...just replace several textures with winter ones and re-render. The foreground snow was created via a plane with an applied texture map...and was added after the main image render (much faster that way).
KEEP5.JPG 20kb	A quick scene done to see how a 'fort' I designed for an AD&D module would really look. The scene is supposed to be in the moonlight...and it still needs alot of work (esp on the lighting).
PLANET1.JPG 37kb	A very easy scene consisting of one planet. The planets land texture was created by the satellite fractal fill on Corel Draw v4.0, and the clouds a similar way. The stars were created by FracTint, a shareware fractal program (very nice btw...).
PLANET4.JPG 35kb	Same as the previous scene, except with four planets, created the exact same way. One could probably create a scenelike this in 15 minutes.
POP1.JPG 19kb	A model of a Sprite can I created when I was bored and noticed a pop can sitting on my desk (hey...that would be fun to model).
ROSE.JPG 26kb	A scene I created as a thank-you card for someone special. I was initially worried about creating the rose...organic shapes can be very difficult as I found out for trees. Fortunately, my first try was quite successfull. I just created a rose-shaped petal in Corel Draw, imported that into TS, bent and deformed the petal a bit, copied and scaled it to create the rose (I'm lazy...remember?). Anyways...I was impressed...even if you aren't. The photo was scanned and put into a simple frame with glass. The necklace drapped on the frame was created link by link and is not perfect, but still not too shabby. The vase for the rose is a simple extruded shape with an applied bump map.
SE.JPG 18kb	Superb Entertainment logo done for some WWW pages.
TEARTH1.JPG 32kb	I wanted to see how realistic a space scene I could create with the moon and the planet earth. I searched the net for a long while trying to find suitable satellite composite images of the earth and moon surfaces. The moon was simple, just paint a sphere with the moon image. The earth is slightly more difficult since the ocean is quite reflective and the land isn't. I went into Photo-Paint, copied the earth image and painted all the water 'black' (since 99% of the blue pixels are water). In TS I then created a transparent image of the land such that the water area's were clear. After painting the land image on top of the water image and covering everything with another slightly larger sphere with the transparent clouds it was essentially done. The stars were again created initially with FracTint and then modified slightly in Photo-Paint to add some colored stars etc...
WL.JPG 32kb	Yet another scene done for fun, mainly to see how some stuff reflected of water wood look.
WLSC2H.JPG 32kb	Another woodland scene with a small pond...not raytraced cause it takes _forever_ (8 hours on a pentium 90 with 40MB of RAM...).

Banner Gallery

Image	Description
DAGBAN.GIF 5kb	Banner for the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.
DAGBAN2.GIF 7kb	Banner for The Elders Scrolls Pages I maintain which contains every conceivable information I know of about this computer game series by Bethesda. This shows a simple 2D-text format which is very easy and quick to do.
TBANNER1.GIF 9kb	Sample I created to show some simple special effects which can be done...in this case transparent text with a lens flare and a simple 3D logo. I can easily create new logos, copy existing ones, or simply paste a copy of a logo you supply me. This type takes a bit longer to do, but the results can be much better.
TBANNER2.GIF 8kb	Another sample I created to show 3D text effect (with wood coloring) and transition background. This is very quick to do...10 minutes or less if my computer behaves itself. 3D text font can be any Windows font.
ESPBAN1.GIF 6kb	Banner for my Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.
ESPBANA2.GIF 6kb	Banner for my Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages.
BRENDA.GIF 7kb
KIDLINKS.GIF 4kb
WILDWEST.GIF 7kb
LOGO1.GIF 4kb
GRAIN1.GIF 3kb
GAMEWRLD.GIF 6kb
SECRET.GIF 5kb
MONEYB1.GIF 7kb
WVIDEO1.GIF 10kb
PVIDEOB.GIF 11kb