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| Lets talk about one of my favorite subjects! Most of my 2D graphics, like the buttons and logos on these web pages are created with Adobe Photoshop. It is the one program that I've found that can pretty much do whatever I need to do with it. Plus there are a lot of Plug-Ins to perform some of the stranger operations you might need. Photoshop is a bit on the expensive side (especially for a beginner such as myself), but is well worth the investment. I am two versions behind the current version because I can't afford to upgrade, but I am quite comfortable with the program I have. There are a number of web pages with great tips and techniques for Photoshop. My favorite (you can see his influence throughout all of my graphics) is Dr. Ozone's. He's a real mad hatter, but his pages are extremely cool. I hope to be able to put up small tutorials on this page to show how I made a certain graphic. Bryce 2 is a program that I just recently bought. It is a 3D landscape rendering program (for lack of a better description). It is easy to use and anyone can create decent looking landscapes with it. It is much harder to create great looking landscapes with it, though. The typical picture will consist of a terrain like an island or a mountain and a cool looking sky. However, the program can be used to create space scenes, underwater landscapes, and just about anything you can imagine. Here is a quick render of an island with these futuristic spherical objects inset into the mountains.  I've not had much time to really play around with this program, but the possibilities look endless. For those of you who wanted to make your own Myst or Riven, this is a good start. At worst your pictures will look unreal like mine. At best, you can't tell if they are a photograph or a rendered graphic. For other 3D renderings, I've been using Ray Dream Designer and Poser. At less than $150, both of these programs are the cheapest available that still have enough options to keep you happy. Poser is a human figure animation program. You can choose a male, female or child figure and put it into the pose you want. You probably could render a "Dancing Baby" animation if you wanted, but it'd be a bit tedious with Poser (not that it wouldn't be with any other program). Poser is great for rendering only figures against a background. It is extremely easy to modify the texture maps to customize your figures as you want them. However, if you want to render them into a complex scene of other 3D objects you will need to import the figures into another 3D program such as Ray Dream Designer (or Ray Dream Studio). Ray Dream Designer is great for beginners. It gives you a taste of 3D graphics without spending $3500 on 3DStudio Max. Version 4 (the one that I have) is a bit limiting in that there is not a mesh modeller, so you pretty much either have to extrude your objects or build them up with primitive shapes (cube, sphere, cylinder, etc). The latest Ray Dream (version 5) is supposed to have a mesh modeller. I rendered the picture below in Ray Dream Designer. It is pretty quick and easy to model simple object such as the ants. It took about an hour to do the whole picture.   I drew the following picture a few years ago as an attempt to get that "comic book" look. First, I drew the figures with pencil on a regular sheet of paper, and inked them in with a ball point pen. Then, the drawing was scanned and edited in Photoshop. The image was colored in Photoshop and the background was added. Below are each of the layers and then the final picture (which has been reduced in size for quicker access on this web page).
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