I know its getting sort of silly how most of what I talk about here is how I’m re-designing this site but this is really neat…. Using Blender, this really powerful 3D design app I’ve been laying the first bricks for the REAL design I’ve been dreaming about featuring on this site…. the real design I’ve been working on is still in the early phase so I doubt it will look like the picture I have but for the first time I have a picture that seems to sort of point in the direction for how things are going to look…the 3d plain face renders of those pictures I took in central park of some trees looks lovely but it really is just a place holder for the REAL new site which is basicly going to be this big wheel with a ball in the center…. that is all I have right now….I’m still hashing out the ideas on what exactly the ball is going to do… is it going to roll around as you tilt the GUI or is it going to bounce off the walls of the inside of the wheel…. is it going to fly around in crazy formations like figure 8s or what. I just don’t know yet……………BUT!!! it looks like the  design process is moving along now at a reasonable pace and thanks to the wonderful people of Papervision3D and the nice improvements made with the new version of papervision I think this is going to come out beautifully… what am I doing… well to get kind of techno about it… I’m building a 3d model which is going to be the actual design of the website in its 3d capasety… then I’m going to turn this model into a special file that the Papervision3D Library for actionscript 3.0 can read and map a Flash designed GUI to the surfaces of…. because these surfaces of the objects will be caked with buttons and videos and pictures I need to keep the 3D models as simple as I can while still hanging onto as much aesthetic of my core ideas as runtime will permit… THIS MEANS I’m going to probably make and remake the site a few times to see how much I can push the limits of the PV3D VS. AS3 runtime errors or just being plain slow (because slow is a bit dull and boring)……..  I’ve been looking forward to the day when all this wonderful stuff would finally meet up with flash… I knew it would when I made my first animations with it in 2000 for this silly one hour long tv show I made for pratt TV in which you basicly were subjected to a lot of flashing lights and badly morphing shapes and colors while listening to a really loud drum machine beat I was tweeking around with and altering knobs as basically this really ugly assault on everyone’s senses but sadly like a lot of my jokes of THAT nature no one really got it except for me about 5 people and everyone else just wanted to kick their tv’s out the window…. the funny thing was quite a few people tried to watch the entire hour (something I honestly never did… because it was aweful… it wasn’t meant to be watched it was meant to be turned off)  to try and see a hidden meaning to it or understand it or maybe be delited by some kind of snappy ending…. no… the drum beats feel a little better twards the end but the end was just a split second of color bars and just blackness for a minute before the next show…..  I had recently seen a few of my first exposures to art cinema and I had spent about 2 hours looking down a hallway from 4 perspectives rapidly skipping up and down the hall…. after about 30 or 40 minutes I felt physically sick and it was amazing that my eyes could get motion sickness that way… also around the same time 3d video games were taking on a new level with the debut of the PS2 and the dreamcast… and my mother had complained that she couldn’t tolerate playing the new 3d games due to a motion sickness….. a sickness I didn’t feel…. I think I had be more conditioned to that kind of interactivity…. but this is also something I’m considering….. THIS is what I learned…. 3D GUI was and is inevitable… its too attractive to ignore… new media is the blending of everything… eventually all things will be interactive and compatible on some level… Papervision3D is a huge step and its exciting…SO you might be wondering why am I using a open source thing like blender when there is more powerful and intuitive tools to work with such as maya and 3dStudio… the answer is really kind of simple…. I can use blender on a G4 laptop… it takes up a tiny amount of space on my computer and its just easy as pie to learn how to use… I installed it and after I sat down I was drawing things within about 2 hours… granted I knew Lightwave and AutoCAD and 3DStudio before (old timey versions… I’ve been falling in and out of love with 3D CAD drafting since I was 15) but I honestly think anyone could learn it… so everyone should cause it is so fun… anyways…. this is what I made today… and I think I’ll put up some random drawings I do with this later.