Actually, development stalled years ago on both the plugins, as my 3D graphics career has blossomed, I settled into married life, and now my wife and I have a baby due in May 2011. The thing is, people haven’t necessarily realized that and continue to regularly seek support on this site in the comments or via email, and my heart goes out to them. I wish them to seek out actively developed plugins, and toss my old, broken defunct plugins onto the scrapheap of history.

I sadly don’t have the spare time to work on either plugin. I wrote the plugins for me, years ago, and decided to share them with others, back when the functionality I sought didn’t already exist. Now, however, there are countless plugins that do similar, if not identical, things to my plugins.

All of my code is free and open source, as is the code my plugins depend upon (like Flickr code and the Lightbox javascripts). If anyone wishes to, please feel free to take over the reigns of either plugin. Barring that, and thus barring either plugin being brought up to date and made to work again, everybody please use alternative plugins that actually get updated more than every three years ;)

Lightbox users, I recommend looking into jQuery Lightbox Plugin. The reason is, besides the fact it is actively updated, 99.999% of issues people have had with my plugin is due to javascript conflicts. You will have fewer WordPress/javascript conflicts if you switch to a plugin that uses jQuery javascript libraries. Mixing Prototype and jQuery leads to heartache and busted website for less technical people.

Regardless of which plugins you opt for, just be aware that my wordpress plugins are old, broken, and utterly unsupported, and no longer in development.

Spread the word, and good luck to you and your blog! It’s been a blast.

Paris lighting: rendered in 30 seconds

I finally have a new machine, that renders approximately 60 times faster to work on than my MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo. This pleases me.

I am also finally updating my portfolio page for the first time since, uh, 2006. I have learned quite a bit since then…

Paris, 2042. Buildings in the background.

This took a while to make.

Made in Maya, rendered in Mental Ray.

You can also check it out full size (Warning! 2560×1600, 1.7MB).

Features spiffy new auto-lightboxing code courtesy of the talented Michael Tyson.

Please read the Frequently Asked Questions included with the plugin before posting a comment!
Get the latest version here . Click a thumbnail pic to see it in action. Learn more about this plugin.

Lightbox 2 allows you to present images in a slick window, while darkening the rest of the page. It makes your site look professional, and adds little to page load times. It does not require any browser plugins to work, and works on just about every web browser out there! When a browser doesn’t support javascript, your web site still looks and works fine.

The brilliant Lightbox 2.2 javascript/css was written by Lokesh Dhakar . I simply made it into a WordPress plugin and added some options. I’ve had help along the way from several others… thank you, your help is much appreciated!

To install: Put the lightbox-2 folder in your WordPress plugins folder, then activate it in WordPress.

Implementing Lightbox is automatic . Create a link to an image to see Lightbox-2 work.

Features:

• Resizes large images to fit the viewer’s screen.
• Auto-lightboxing of all links to images in your posts. No more manually adding rel= to your links! This can be turned off in Lightbox 2 admin options. Also, no double rel= tags.
• Grabs the title from the img title or the img alt if there is no anchor title.
• Themes that determine the colours of the lightbox window. You can select from Black, White or Grey.
• No longer conflicts with any WordPress themes! This means it looks right, every time. Almost. Unless you are using a theme called stimuli_lightbox… ;)
• Uses wp_enqueue_script to prevent multiple prototype and scriptaculous libraries from clobbering each other. At least with other plugins that use wp_enqueue_script.
• This version works when wordpress is installed in non-standard locations , ie: /wordpress/ instead of /, whereas other Lightbox plugins break.
• Uses the arrow keys as well as P and N keys to navigate between images. The X and Escape keys close the Lightbox window, as does clicking anywhere outside the image.
• Minor cosmetic changes from the scripts by Lokesh.

YES, I will be adding WP 2.5+ ‘gallery’ lightboxing functionality in the future… not very soon, however! So try this plugin in the meantime!

Please read the Frequently Asked Questions included with the plugin before posting a comment!

Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, is the single greatest influence on my art. Born in Paris in 1938, he is in my opinion, by far the greatest illustrator to have lived. Moebius doesn’t have a particular style; rather, he has thousands of styles, often unique to the project he is working on. One of the founders and lead contributors to the seminal 1970′s comic magazine, Metal Hurlant (better known on this side of the Atlantic as Heavy Metal Magazine), his career has been as prolific as it has far reaching and influential.

You may know him indirectly from his contributions as storyboard artist for movies such as Alien, Abyss, 5th Element, Tron or countless others. His short comic with Dan O’Bannon, The Long Tomorrow, influenced the phenomenal movie Blade Runner as well as the writings of William Gibson, my favorite science fiction author.

I’ve learned so much from seeing and absorbing Moebius’ works. I’ve focused on drawing speed and line quality. I’ve learned to embrace the surreal and non-clich� in my own work, I’ve learned to adopt countless styles of drawing and creating, I’ve learned to play with narrative flow and just make stuff up as I go along. But my own work pales in comparison to the master.

I’ve long since stopped reading comics, and long since stopped drawing, yet the Moebius influence pervades my work even to this day. He was my last, and single greatest, influence in drawing.

There is precious little of his work on the web, and I don’t have a scanner, so alas I can’t provide many good examples of what he is capable of. Suffice to say I have at least 12 of his graphic novels, my favorite being his and Stan Lee’s epic Silver Surfer: Parable.

A thing of beauty, Silver Surfer is graceful, angelic and renaissance-inspired. Galactus is a massive false god who attempts to destroy human civilization. Page after page of jaw-dropping futuristic cityscapes, glass citadels and epic battles for earth’s fate.

Jean Giraud is a fountain of creativity. He is unto drawing, what Michelangelo is unto marble sculpture: pure genius. Horror, eroticism, fantasy, sci-fi, gorgeous desert landscapes, surrealism… he does it all, and better than I’ve seen it done before or since.

A documentary about Moebius is posted online at drawn.ca.

To see how strong an influence he was on my teenage mind, check out the old drawings at the bottom of my portfolio page.

A lengthy interview with her has surfaced on the web. She’s a very eloquent, brainy spokeswoman! She is certainly role model material, and I’m glad the Firefox people do what they do.

Check it out.

I also love my wage, which is generous and is just the starting wage. I’ve had my eye for years on a pair of audiophile-grade, floorstanding, unique and incredible speakers called Ohm Micro-Walsh Talls, which sell for over a grand US plus shipping. Not only can I now afford them, I can afford a new pair every paycheck. I’ve got my Visa bill licked after the first payday. I’m not sweating my student loans.

Work hard and play hard. And sleep hard. That’s always been my lifestyle and I get to live it every day. Nothings as great as getting up at 7 am and being stoked about the day ahead.

Happiness is feeling appreciated, and I do.

I recognize the challenge of creating a game that is ‘interacted’ with only by hitting a small handful of buttons (Thank you Nintendo Wii for breaking us out of that!) that involves any kind of subtlety, complexity or nuance, but come on.
When Tron makes your game’s plot look weak and contrived, it’s time for a re-think!

I hope the stagnation of the current game industry creates a backlash of innovation and ingenuity.

The style of writing is lustrous and beautiful, which I’d have to say is pretty rare in the media. The topic of the piece is surprisingly abstract and unusual for the IHT. A refreshing change of pace.
If you have time, read Words, pure and unfiltered at iht.com