A View from Stanage Edge in the Peak District

My Projects

STALE: The content needs bringing up-to-date

I cannot think of a time when I wasn't working on some computer-related project.


Contents:


3D Graphics

My primary past-time has always been programming and very time consuming it is too. But if I wasn't a programmer, I would definitely liked to have been a 3D modeller.

Ever since the 1980's, when I saw films like "Tron" and "The Last Starfighter", the idea of creating "virtual realities" has really appealed to me. It's impressive to realize that any image you care to imagine can now be created on a computer.

Towards the end of the 1990's, I started thinking about ways that I might get started producing images on my computer and found that there was a thriving community experimenting with a free ray-tracing application called POV-Ray. This appealed to me, as POV-Ray has it owns scene description language, which as a programmer, crossed over right into my main area of interest.

I experimented with POV-Ray for some time, but wasn't able to produce complex scenes as quickly as I would have liked - until I discovered Wings 3D. This fantastic FREE modeller is so intuitive and easy to use. Although the software is still very much in development, the quality and amount of features already implemented are more than enough to create some great models.

So, the following projects represent the best of what I have achieved so far using the combination of Wings3D and POV-Ray.


Project - Blade Runner Spinner

ARCHIVED

Blade Runner is one of my favourite films and is full of wonderful imagery. Lots of people have modelled the famous Police Spinner - I wanted to go through the process of modelling my own.

Link to Article


Project - Mamod Steam Engine

ARCHIVED

When I was a kid, my parents bought me a model steam engine - when I saw a picture of one recently on the net, I decided it would be a nice model to make with Wings 3D.

Link to Article


Project - POVRay Experiments

ARCHIVED

POVRAY is an excellent, free ray-tracer that's been around for a few years now. There is a huge amount of POVRAY related-material on the net, which pursuaded me to give it a try.

Link to Article


Project - Seaside Themes

(Published: 1 February 2006)

ARCHIVED

I've always liked the sights and sounds of the English sea-side. I thought I might try my hand at modelling a few sea-side scenes for the site. The originals are 2048x1536 pixels, but I can re-render them in any size. The post-production filters are applied in Photoshop and give the images a 'hand-drawn' look.

Link to Article


Project - Tyrell Corporation Building

ARCHIVED

Circa 2002

In December 2000, I decided to have a go at modelling something fairly complex in POV-Ray. This was going to be my first project and as I had already decided that I wasn't going to use a 3D modeller, I chose the Tyrell Building (pictured below) because of it's straight lines and symmetrical shape would be relatively straightforward to describe using POV-Ray's own scene description language.

Link to Article


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Software Development

Project - BASH Shortcuts (sc)

I’ve been using Linux since 1999 and would class myself as an intermediate-level BASH user. I write the occasional script in BASH, but tend to use PHP-CLI for my more complex scripting needs (after all, I am a certified PHP developer).

Link to Article


Project - Blade Runner Quiz

ARCHIVED

Between 2001 and 2005, I was managing Bladezone and had spent a lot of time discussing the film in the Bladezone forums and also reading several of the books available on the subject.

Link to Article


Project - Tile Saver

(Published: 1 August 2005)

ARCHIVED

Tile Saver is an image slideshow screen saver which transitions from image to image using a 'tile flip' animation. Tile Saver can display most images of any size or format (jpg/png/bmp) - just point it at your image directory and off it goes.

Link to Article


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Websites

Project - Bladezone

ARCHIVED

Between the years 2001 and 2005 I managed the content for Bladezone - during that time I edited more than a dozen articles. Although the words were usually someone else's, the article presentation was left to me.

Link to Article


Project - Blue Block Web Design

ARCHIVED

Sometime in 2010, I had an idea to become a freelance web designer - I opened a trading account and set up the website. Alas, circumstances changed before it really got going and I went into full-time employment as a web developer.

Link to Article


Project - Personal Website

(Updated: 14 April 2017)

I've had a homepage in one form or another since I first got an internet connection in the 90s. Here's a few facts about the current incarnation.

Link to Article


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