Cool New Stuff Going On....
I like to keep busy with side projects... since I do a lot of less artistic work with coding and project management on my jobs I tend to do artistically rewarding side projects for personal work. It's kind of a left brain/right brain thing. I like to feed both sides of my brain.
One of my more recent "'toys" is an example of using textures and surfaces to create 3D effects (where there aren't any)... the clip below contains NO 3D elements - it's all optical illusions done in Adobe After effects - and it's actually pretty simple.
We layer one text element over the previous one, each having a slight difference in shading and a few pixel over lap. We then take and set a light on each - and tie the lighting together. Now... drop a texturize layer on the back, apply a ripple effect to that - and it's all set.
Another variant on this trick is to use several texture layers with a 3-D zoom - which is how this effect is achieved below:
You can find more samples on the video page.
I'm also working on some more samples for development toys using WPF (Microsoft Expression Blend) - currently I'm working on a continuation of the CXML Validation tool I cobbled together a while ago.
Eventually I should have some samples of everything here - but it'll take some time.