The writeups have also been a test of a plugin I stumbled across the other week called ‘Inventory manager’ and can be downloaded from alphachannelgroup.com

While trying to come up with the pages I was looking for something to help list items without having to:
a) use a shoping cart plugin
b) write loads of html to sort them into neat tables/rows/columns/items/etc….

What Inventory manager does is allow you to create a database list of items and fill in the details via a simple, yet very customisable, form. There are a few little bits to tweak in the controls such as names of categories, display options, labels and the css which help to give a huge degree of control over the look of the items. As I was listing Items which I am not selling I was able to disable the ‘reserve’ feature after I had spent some tinkering to change the default from $ into £. I thought of originally listing prices that I paid for the games but realised that some of the items had been bought over 20 years ago so price was a bit pointless.

My initial installation of the plugin met with a little bit of frustration as I was unable to add new items and eventually contacted the plugin writer via the site. Cale (the creator) was fab in helping sort the issue and and even pointed out a few things I hadn’t thought of when I was playing with the plugin. All in all, this is a nice plugin for an ecommerce site with or without the commerce. I can really see a good use for this on sites with a big list of products but only one or two of each item such as bespoke crafted items, antiques or secondhand dealers.

Zbrush 4 is now out and installed. Not touched beyond firing it up.
Mass Effect has been started. May never finish due to not getting much time on it.
Started writing some new pages on here about the roleplay/boardgames we play at home. May never be happy with descriptions.

All other projects are also ongoing.

I’ve spent the last week learning some new wordpress stuff though. A few quick hits here and there but I’ve had too much on the plate after the holiday to be able to do much more.

Using GoZ I dumped old bod here into c4d to do a quick test render of the material i’ve been painting and he’s coming along nicely.

The specular is far too high but then I should probably do a map for that as well. I think a tiny bit more work on the skin then onto the rest of the body.

I’m getting in the mood for the summer ‘super-family-special-holiday-funtime’ by clearing out some of my harddrive and playing with unfinished projects, so here is a little update of frogbear with a touch of colour. This is the start of a base coat for the skin and I have no idea what I am aiming for but its pretty fun to play with brushes paint tools, even if the damn thing keeps crashing… I’m not sure about the green at the moment and may go for a more browny tone but the sickly green does have a nice unearthly feel.

The result is: http://www.kirkd.co.uk/blog/index.php/yoxtest/ which is nothing more than a test to show two galleries in one page meaning multiple galleries can be used across one site easily.

There is a plugin but where is the fun in that eh? So will all due respect to @singlecelldsgn for inspiring me I give the following.

The following scripts are placed into the header or the footer:

<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.kirkd.co.uk/yoxview/yoxview-init.js”></script>

This calls the yoxview plugin and also fires up the js library at googleapis without needing to add that as another line of script. I’ve hardcoded the js for now as I wanted to make sure it worked properly plus its the same one as my main site. This line of code may change in the future.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
$(“#yoxview_picasa”).yoxview({
dataUrl: ‘http://picasaweb.google.com/dr.monkeyface/2DWork?thumbsize=104′
});
});
</script>

Now we pick the gallery to draw the images from. In this case its my 2d folder and the name of the div is going to be the default ‘yoxview_picasa’

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
$(“#yoxview_colour”).yoxview({
dataUrl: ‘http://picasaweb.google.com/dr.monkeyface/ColourTent?thumbsize=104′
});
});
</script>

NEXT! Now I pick a different folder on picasa which is the slightly funky colourdome. I also changed the div it will be placed into and its now ‘yoxview_colour’ pretty logical so far.

In the page I want the gallerys to display I just drop the required div

<div id=”yoxview_picasa”></div>

or

<div id=”yoxview_colour”></div>

What this allows me to do (as previously mentioned) is setup multiple pages all running a different yoxview gallery on each page without having to maintain the thumbnails or worry about plugins.

Job done.