Tutorial from Transfuschian.

The hardest part about this tutorial is cutting the extra lines before you apply color to your background. It took me several hours before I figured out the perspective and which lines I had to cut. Tip: select the letter on which you are removing extra lines, and if none of the back lines extend into the space of the letter on the right, then you’re done. If there are lines that do extend into the the letter on the right, select the path of the line, and cut the parts that are in the next letter. That was probably made it more confusing but it’s easier to show than to tell.

I got lazy with the mesh grid so the highlighting effects didn’t turn out very well. A tip for this step: make more grids with smaller spaces so you can control the color and highlighting effect better.

On a side note, because of the futuristic theme of the tutorial, I had the “Space Oddity” (Cat Power’s cover of David Bowie) Lincoln MKZ commercial stuck in my head while I was working on this.

Tutorial

I had the most trouble doing the radial gradient. I couldn’t quite get the lighting effect right and in retrospect probably should have applied some opacity, I dunno. The color of the tiles on the disco ball isn’t to my complete satisfaction either, but I got to the point where if I edited it any more, it would just look more crappy. So I stopped. And this is what I got.

Two million flights pass through New York’s airspace each year. Artist Aaron Koblin used images from his piece, Flight Patterns, to create a Google map representing air traffic across the United States over a 24-hour period. The map displays the flight paths for more than 205,000 aircraft the FAA tracked on August 12, 2008.

Using data provided by FlightView, a service that provides real-time air-travel information, Koblin layers flight patterns by altitude, aircraft model and manufacturer.

Altitude: Dark colors indicate a higher altitude; lighter shades indicate takeoff and landing.

Aircraft model: Each of the 573 airplanes are represented by a unique color.

Manufacturer: Flight frequency is tracked by aircraft manufacturer.

This project was a collaboration among Aaron Koblin, FlightView and Wired Magazine.

The Icon A5, designed to thrill and a breeze to fly. Joy ride, anyone?

I really wish I could describe in full detail what happened in this picture (as well as my backwards somersault, but I still had the camera at the time). I was ahead of Tommy and just so happened to stop and turn around to see how far behind he was. Just then, I see him come skidding down the run, make a hard right, and tumble over the run’s edge into the tree…upside down. This is the picture of him after managing to somewhat get himself upright and back onto the run. And this happened on the *second* day we were there. You’d think you’d get better after more practice.

Oh yeah, he also ran into the yellow padding on a pole earlier.

…and I’m playing outdoor soccer at 4:15pm, with possibly one-man down…