Microsoft Power

Please be patient while this page loads.  If you just start reading what I've written, then by the time you finish the page will have loaded.  Or you can stare at the pretty animated GIF.  Stare at the pretty rotating colors.  You are getting sleepy...  very sleepy...  And when you wake up, the page will have loaded.

I've seen so many of these animated icons that I felt like I had to do one of my own.  Something a little different.  Something cool.  I also felt like I should put something about Spilled Milk in it otherwise people would be taking my cool looking icon and using it on their site.  Wouldn’t want that.  The new look of Windows XP inspired me to do something bright so I fired up Bryce.  Threw down a few cylinders and sliced them up using Boolean logic.  Copy… Paste… Change the material and color.  Reposition a little and voila! You’ve got yourself a cool looking glass logo.  Then all you need to do is set it in motion and apply a little text to it.  Yeah, well, easier said than done I can tell you.

The above image shows you the Bryce 4.0 interface.  I haven’t upgraded to 5.0, because at the moment I don’t have a use for a tree editor and I don’t think I’d have the time for it right now anyway.  If you stare at the wire-frame lines you might be able to make out the cylinders within cylinders.  The larger one is positive and the inner one is negative.  If they are grouped together, then they will produce a hollowed cylinder much like a toilet paper roll.  Next I took a block and overlapped the cylinders, but I made sure there was some of the edge sticking out.  This edge would be the only thing left once I set the “negative” attribute on the block and grouped it with the cylinders.  I was able to copy these three grouped primitives and duplicate them for the rest of the Windows logo.  I applied different colored textures of glass and moved them into position.  You can see the shapes a bit better in the image below.

Then you make sure the camera is in the right spot and that the background with the lighting will create a color that will be easily masked when finished.  I try to get the background close so when I fill it with the gray that I use for the site “#C0C0C0” it doesn’t bleed into the edges of my logo.  You fiddle with that aqua scroll bar a little (in the Bryce interface pictured above) and rotate the scene in two 180 degree passes.  You can preview your animation or just go for broke and render it to disk.  You will get a nice AVI (21 MB file) or MOV (Quicktime movie) file that you can bring into Adobe Image Ready.

With the power of Adobe you can turn the background of each frame into the soothing color of your choice.  You can also resize it to taste.  Well, the animation below is no "hamster dance", but feel free to build one to pay homage to the almighty Microsoft... And then have your server shut you down, because you're destroying the bandwidth for the paying customers.