Building a website

#1

Among all the other things I’m behind on, I’ve started putting together a website. Not much to show at the moment other than this mock-up for the index page …

And these are some of the hotspots I’m adding …

Everything in the top image is shown active, but they are designed as rollover images (some lights just blink for no reason :: animated gifs). I also have text that highlights in the top right corner to identify each item.

Suggestions for additional features, critique of my sloppy layout, or any other comments relating to the future development of the website are much appreciated.

#2

first of all, i feel honored that you want to use the cockpit :blush:

i think it works very well though. my first suggestion would be to use a more recent rendering. don’t you think? tell me if you want it with the plain textures, or with some materials applied as in one of the recent renderings

#3

Looking awesome! I can’t say with a quick glance what works and what doesn’t. If I come up with anything I’ll drop a note here.

Kenn

#4

oh and i don’t really know if you planned this, but the aliens have to be in there for sure! one way to do it quick & dirty would be to bake the models and import the meshes into max so i can render them in the cockpit. of course we could also set the scene up in maya, with some more work.

#5

I was going to use the last render you had, but when I went to get the image all I saw was a big red X. Post a render here and I’ll see if it’s not too late to make adjustments.

I really don’t want to put the aliens in the cockpit at this time. I think it works well just being an empty cockpit. Which, gives the user the impression that they can browse the ship and find it’s features themselves.

#6

Looks great Kirt.

:beer:

#7

Here you can see some of the rollovers and animated gifs in action

#8

looking good kirt. the animated blinking is a nice touch, but it should be kept to a minimum i think, otherwise it might be distracting. the display that’s constantly changing colors is a little too much in my humble opinion.

here is a new render. the materials were just to get a basic look & feel… i hope they’re ok. you can get it as a tif right here

#9

well, I think using the nice sketches of yours is a better idea than using the 3d meshes, in the first place, as the opening/main page.
maybe you should re-draw some new sketches/poses/concepts/drawings/paintings/whatever for the main page interface :slight_smile: this image is a bit confusing.

#10

ila - The reason I’m putting a 3D rendered image on the front page is because the film is going to be 3D. I don’t want to confuse anyone into thinking this is a 2D short.

I am planning on doing some newer drawings of the characters and such (a little more refined) for the other pages. Hopefully that will make things look snappy.

fist - Thanks for the render, but maybe we can use it for ver 2.0? I think I like the other render better because it shows that this is WIP.

I’d like to finalize the cockpit textures and materials before using that version. I’ll give you some more ideas of what I’ll need for the web render when I have more free time (at work right now).

#11

wow, nice job Kirt!

are you coding this? or would you want someone to make this in flash, or…?

#12

this looks really good, nice work. My only criticism at the moment is the hotspots for animation tests, music and progress report don’t stand out as spots to click, but I’m sure this will change towards the final version.

#13

If you need any help coding the website or need some flash programming done, I’ll be glad to help. I’m a terrible artist, so I can’t help with design, but I can code.

#14

Good … I think the Kirt idea is a good page… I probably like more “green lights” around tha page…

…I dunno why, but I imagine that the color of AlienZ is the green! :slight_smile:

is it?

:applause:

#15

omg thats nice

#16

Originally posted by DrAdamDinosaur
… the hotspots for animation tests, music and progress report don’t stand out as spots to click …
You’re right. That’s because it’s not done yet :smiley:

I’m not sure what coding needs to be done for this page. I’m pretty much building it in Adobe and Macromedia as an HTML page. So, all that needs to be added is links to the other pages when they’re put together.

If someone wants to put this into flash and add to it somehow that would be fine. My only question is, will the page load better/faster as Flash or HTML?

When I have the other rollovers set up, I can post the PSD file for download.

Bells and whistles are nice, but if the page takes too long to load I don’t want to bother with it.

Kirt’s personal pet peeve #246 - Web pages that load longer than 5 seconds without displaying some sort of content to keep me interested in hanging around.

#17

i’m with you kirt… short load times all the way.

the problem with your html page is that on slow connections (like my 128k isdn) while it loads the images you don’t see the rollovers at first. if we do this with html + javascript (which i think is the way to go) we should preload the images. kinda seems more solid.

and i agree, we should probably find a way to make the ‘clickable areas’ stand out more, i hate doing that monkey island style searching for items on websites :wip:

in monkey island it was cool though :beer:

#18

Well…do not confuse the heaviness of the page with the technologies used to make it.

Flash = more heaviness … is false.

All depend by the number of bitmap you have to load in the page.
The animation, the effects and the vectorial gfx has his heavy, but it is not considerable as the bitmap heaviness.
In some case, Flash solves a lot of problems that html code has inside and and speed up the construction work and management.

My new site (in construction) is only 60 kb, at the moment.
“Probably” with ImageReady I cannot made this one and, however, the heaviness will be the same or more.
My new site

Ok…after this dirty publicity to my site :drool:
I great you…
bye

#19

I would suggest HTML + Javascript. There is some overhead with Flash, though not much. On slow computers there will be a several second wait, whereas, with HTML + JS there isn’t really any extra wait.

#20

cool site cut! very nice indeeed.

i say whatever gets the job done… those rollovers are really no problem with javascript. i agree with grosserfrosch, although the difference might not be big i’d also prefer html+js.

updating the site will also be more straight forward this way.