And now for something completely different ... are you ready for this? The guy next door. Seriously. Not a barbarian, not a muscle-rippling hunk who'd be secretly envied by Brad Pitt. Not a seven foot tall cyborg with red hair or the captain of a NARC Carrier. Just the guy next door, imaged in a simulation of available light on a bright day with loads of daylight falling in through a window opposite the clock. Hard shadows and so forth. These are also raytraced, which in this instance makes quite a difference. Sometimes it does, sometimes not.
Originally, I wanted to delete all the lights (there are actually seven, set to create the reflected light of the room) and set the scene up again in lamplight, but I just got slammed with work, so I'm not going to have the time. Will keep it in mind for another day. So there you have the guy next door ... actually, he's kinda cute. Trying to remember a time I ever lived in a place with one of these next door. Ummm --!
Answering one swift question before I go today: I was asked, what's the trick of making Blogger display an image on the page at 1:1 size, instead of arbitrarily resizing it? I often put up a nice, big image that fills the whole center column instead of winding up as a postage stamp -- what's the deal with that? In fact, those images are not hosted by Blogger, they're remote loaded from our own space at DreamCraft. Basically, you would just make sure your image is the right size to fit whatever space on your blog page you need, and upload it to your own online cache -- which could be Flickr, which is free, or could be your own domain. We use our own DreamCraft for a couple of reasons. For one, FTP is sooooo much easier than pratting around with people's interfaces. (We use a golden oldie FTP program, a little thing called FTP Commander, where the icon is a worried mouse with a black eye! You'd think it would give trouble with Vista or Windows 7, but nope. Frankly, it's too simple to cause trouble.) Then, when you remote load the image, you only have to type/copy in the exact url of where it lives, into Blogger's add image dialog. In my case it would be something like http://www.dream-craft.com/jade/Barbarian-princess-and-swordsman_01.jpg ... how simple is that? And when you remote load a pic, Blogger leaves it be. It pastes up exactly as you uploaded it.
Hope this helps!
And so -- to work. Sorry this is a bit brief today. There should have been more, but -- tomorrow.
Jade, 8 April
