white space and simplicity in web sites

After viewing websites for many years I have noticed what makes a good web site and what doesn't. Now that I have begun to create my own web sites it has increased my knowledge greatly. I now have a better eye for analyzing a web site and can tell exactly what would hold someones interest and what doesn't.

A big factor for this is making a web site fairly simple, including a good amount of white space, and not over cluttering a page. If the web site presents too much information and contains huge walls of text, people are less likely to stick around and read it. Often times a simple interface is the best option.

The best example I can think of is www.google.com. This highly successful website owes its popularity for its extreme simplicity and great use of white space. Google gets right down to the point on its main page and doesn't bombard the viewer with too much extraneous information. I keep this theme of simplicity in my own design.

Curtains

Another cool technique I learned when working with Cinema 4-D is a way to kind of cut corners and have materials appear as if they were 3-D.

A good example is when I showed Todd my Comedy Club technique he at first thought I made the curtain as a 3-D object. Actually , it was just a material I made out of a texture I found on google images.

These kind of "cheats" can streamline the process making something look 3-D when in reality it isnt.

Antz

When I was growing up the film Antz was one of my favorite films. Now that I have played around with 3-D modeling I found a new found respect for how much work has to be done to create CGI films.

Generating hundreds of ants doing seperate motions is incredible when you realize how much work could go into just mere seconds of actual video.

It seems like they used a lot of instances and duplicates to show the large amount of Antz. I have a new found insight into the making of these type of films and I found it extremely interesting.

Spotlight

A cool technique I learned was to create actual light sources and have them project light. On my comedy club piece I made a spot light by having a box with a spherical boole in it. From there I shown a visible light on the stage. I like how it turned out.
It was difficult at first to get it to constrast well. When I dimmed the lights in the main area of the club it started to look quite realistic.

Comedy Club

For the 6th project, interior of a room, I choose to do a comedy club. It consists of several tables and chairs placed around the room, a bar, exit doorways, and a stage with a curtain. I used dim lights in the main area of the club and strategically placed a visible spotlight on the stage where a comedian would be performing. This contrasts well with the dim light in the club. The backstage consists of a table, brighter lighting, and another exit. I also placed a few funny pictures on the walls.

Tippmann paintball gun ads

For project 4 and 5 I created two half page ads for Tippmann paintball guns. The first I used primitives to set up some components of a paint ball course and created a wooden paint splattered material. In photoshop I added the company name and crosshairs. The second ad I modeled a Tippmann 98 Custom. In photoshop I added the text.

Organic Object

For project #3 I created a broken egg. I made the two parts of the shell with a boole and then made it have a cracked appearance with selecting and deleting certain parts of the edge. The yolk was made with primitives and transparent materials.