Bad luck

Well, guess what. About two weeks ago, my computer crashed. I quickly bought a new one, and it arrived more quickly than expected. However, after taking a couple of days reinstalling all my software, I would randomly get the infamous Windows blue screen of death and the computer would reboot. I've been doing everything I could to try to figure out what was wrong with it so I could get it back up and running, but with no luck. Finally, today, I cut my losses, formatted the hard drive, and reinstalled the operating system. I'm still in the process of reinstalling my old software, but I at least now have the essentials (Firefox, Microsoft Office, and Adobe Creative Suite) on there.

In the meantime, I've been searching for high[er] resolution images to use in the graphic. Here's what I need, as well as the progress on each:

Grassy ground texture - Found one that should work, but I can't yet tell without the rest of it. I plan on cropping out the ocean and zooming in a little bit. It will look a lot better once I change the perspective in Photoshop.
Mountain 1 - I found one that looks good overall, but its colors definitely need some tweaking to make it fit in with the ground texture.
Mountain 2 - (Still looking.)
Earth cutaway texture - I found two, and either one should work fairly well. Once I get the rest of it together, I'll try them both and obviously go with the one that looks better.

The mock-up I created before took very little time, as lower resolution images are much more easily accessible. Finding high resolution images of ground texture (from aerial/satellite photography) and mountains has [surprisingly] proven difficult.

I even asked my dad, a longtime United States Geological Survey employee, about finding something that would work for the ground texture, but he said that most of what's readily available is of rural areas, which isn't what I want.

After going through literally thousands of images on Google Images, I found one (a ground texture, that is) that should work.

I've attached all the images I've found so far.

Trial Run - Moving the Mountains

Flash on Blogger

Just as a note, I was going to add my past Flash files along with their respective posts but Blogger cannot import Flash files. There is a way around this (converting to either animated GIF or a video format), but I have yet to do it.

Long story short: It will be done.

Specifics about the tools being used

When you created the landscape-y image, what application did you use? What file types does it generate? Can those file types be used in Flash as things that can then be animated? Is there a way to change the quality of the images or does the app not allow that sort of control? What sorts of variation on this theme (the mountains and landscape features) are possible? Can you provide some different versions (especially if you've already made them)? What I'm getting at is, how flexible is this tool?

How to start the lit review

What is stasis theory all about? Why is it used as a way to talk about scientific arguments? How is it described in the literature? (Refer to Mark Turner, other sources, and my TWI article if it's helpful - www.writinginstructor.com/northcut) but be sure to paraphrase, not copy - put it in your own words and only quote directly if absolutely necessary.

Why are you doing this?

As a way to start the research paper, see how you can answer this question. You need to be able to describe what you're doing and argue for the value of the work. As a start, shoot for one paragraph, and spend 1/2 hour on it.

Figure 2 Comparison

As I stated in my previous post, I used Dr. Northcut's figure 2 as a skeleton for a more realistic version. You can see a comparison of the two here. I began by adding simple textures to each of the planes ('earth' texture for beneath the surface, 'terrain' texture for the surface.' Adding the textures consisted of a combination of rotating, scaling, skewing, flipping, and cutting out the images. For example, the earth texture on the right side of the image is from the same source as the front texture, but I rotated and changed the perspective on it to complement the 3D look.

For the mountains, I used the same image, but just flipped it horizontally to make it look slightly different. I also made sure that each was hanging off an edge to add to the 3D look (in other words, to give the mountain volume).

I replaced the old arrows with bigger, bolder arrows, and added a small starburst to illustrate the clash at the site of stasis.

If Dr. Northcut sees potential in this type of illustration, I will likely start from scratch, use more realistic and higher quality textures, create a much larger image (so it can be displayed larger if desired), and use different source images on the mountains for added realism. I will also optimize the image for both online and print viewing, making it available in RGB and grayscale versions.

Click here to view the comparison image in full size.

1/29/08

Dr. Northcut and I decided to work on static images as a possible alternative to animations. I'm going to begin by looking at the original graphics that she used in her article and thinking of ways to improve them. I believe she still wants it to have a realistic look to it, which is going to be the challenging part. I've thought of using a 3D topo map as a base and working from that, but the more I think about it, the harder I think it'll be. The thing I'm leaning toward now is to draw the landscapes myself and then just add textures that make it look as realistic as possible.

1/14/08

I worked a lot over break, so I didn't have any time at all to work on this project. However, I'm resuming my research now. On a side note, I have begun using Adobe Illustrator for my job at the newspaper and, to my surprise, learning Flash has really helped me with it. Graphic design in Flash is also vector based (Photoshop, which I am very familiar with, is not), so by learning Flash I as inadvertently learning the basics of Illustrator as well.

11/30/07

I made a better, more detailed animation of what Dr. Northcut needs, but it's too cartooney for her tastes. She recommended that I find 'rolling hills on a golf course' and try to emulate them. Google Images was no help, so I gave up on that. Our next idea was to create and animate a 3D topography map. I found a great website (http://www.forgefx.com/casestudies/prenticehall/ph/topo/topo.htm) for creating 3D topography maps, but was unsuccessful in trying to animate them. My next idea was to use a 3D modeling program - 3D Studio Max, for example - to create the animation. I found a good 3D Studio Max landscape tutorial (http://pilning.net/manual/buildinglandscapes.htm), but as with ForgeFX (the 3D topo program), animating it turned out to be the problem. Running out of ideas, Dr. Northcut suggested animated GIFs as a possible alternative. This is where we are currently, although I believe that a further-developed version of my most recent Flash animation would be more professional (despite its cartooneyness).

11/9/07

I haven't updated this in a while, but I have been making leaps in Flash. My first animation, a simple bouncing ball (as suggested by one of the books I have), took no time at all, and it was basically all the practice I needed to create a working - albeit rough - model of the animation that Dr. Northcut needs. I had some trouble with the second hill rising while the first one was still there, so to get it to work, I had to have them both go away before the second could rise.

9/26/07

The Flash books and videos have been a great help. While some of the stuff in the videos is too basic and slow-paced, I still get something out of them. Soon, I'm going to begin my first animation.

9/19/07

Going through the videos some more, I've just learned about bezier curves. I had seen these before, but never done much with them. They do appear to be very handy, though, and I have a feeling that I'm going to become very familiar with them over the next several months. Related to bezier curves, anchor points are new to me as well. The main point in a bezier curve is apparently the anchor, while a handle comes out of the anchor and has a small point on each side. The handle is used to make curves, while the anchor is - as it sounds - the anchor of the curve. Anchors can be added, deleted, or converted easily using tools of those names.

There are many similarities, as expected, to graphic design programs that I've used in the past, such as Photoshop. My knowledge of Photoshop is already proving to help me catch on much more quickly to Flash than I would have otherwise.

Even so, the only animation I've ever done was with simple GIFs, so I'm expecting some challenges when I get to that section of the tutorial.

Something I like a lot about Flash already is the way it handles the pencil tool. It can make a shaky line perfectly straight; it can make a mediocre circle perfectly round. And the anti-aliasing makes it all look very smooth.

The primitive shape tools can do many things that Photoshop cannot easily do (to my knowledge). In the past, I've had to do things manually in Photoshop that Flash can do in a matter of clicks.

In addition to these videos, I've been flipping through a couple of Flash books that my dad happened to have. They're 700-800 pages each, and one includes a CD with some project files on it. I'll be going through those after I finish this video series.

9/2/07

Well, I just opened Flash CS3 for the first time and I admit, I'm overwhelmed. I thought I could just play around with it and learn the basics of it, like I do with all other software I encounter. But with this, I'm afraid that I'll need some guidance before I can even get started. Right away, I began downloading some tutorial videos that should help me along. They just finished, so I'm off to try them out now.