Site Version 2.1

Oh, hello there!

Welp, looks like this is gonna be a text-y post (hopefully not too long), but I wanted to let you lovely handful of viewers know about the changes that have occurred on the site this weekend.

First, and most obvious, is a visual change to the design. The splash page now features Amaruuk, in all her parallaxing, puppet mesh goodness (I ♥ After Effects) as I find her a bit more fitting to represent me (her name is my alias on Twitter/CGHub/etc. anyway). Also, I have decided to change the site's header a bit, making it smaller and less visually distracting with a simple texture on the menu bar rather than a whole picture of something up in the corner. There is also a new favicon of a tiny pixel Amaruuk!

Second are the structural changes. I ended up not implementing the new lightbox system (could not for the life of me figure it out, plus I realized I didn't really need any extra functions after all) so I went back and finally figured out what broke the old one on the blog and fixed it, so now it and the main site once again use the same system, albeit changed a bit visually (new loading image, colors changed, and replaced the image frame with a shadow). The galleries were restructured a bit, most notably the sculpture section. It's lacking in content for the moment (only 2 things left since I took out the old college stuff) but now shows work in a more user-friendly, consistent, and base-covering way. Each piece there is presented with a "money shot" and a Vimeo turntable. No more need for Flash Player in case someone's on a mobile device or doesn't have it for some other reason. As for the illustration section, the main change was to the piece Hunter, underneath which you'll find a link which will toggle a Vimeo video beneath it showing the animated version. I will be presenting any videos of future "living illustrations" in this manner as well, being both unintrusive and not requiring viewers to go to some other section.

Speaking of Vimeo, the last thing I guess is that I subscribed to Vimeo Plus, so now I can upload more than one HD video per week (which I definitely needed for the turntables) and I get more control over my embedded players, most notably hiding parts that aren't needed and adding a little doodad that displays at the end of videos in which I put some button links for social media and my site too, mostly in case they get embedded somewhere else and can direct viewers to my stuff.