About the Cornsnake Graphics:

I’ve been asked by a lot of people if I make these images in Photoshop. The short answer is I don’t use Photoshop for anything. I do use a similar program called Paint Shop Pro, which is a lot easier to use and has a lot less overhead than Photoshop, and is quite a bit cheaper, but that’s not how I make my graphics. This logo was created with a 3-d program, similar to the ones you see used for movie special FX. To create a picture with one of these programs, you must first create a mesh and a texture. The mesh is a 3-dimensional latticework of triangles which defines the 3-dimensional shape of the object.

The texture is a flat picture which is then wrapped around the mesh like wallpaper. If you look at the snakeskin picture on the left (the navbar) you can see the same pattern as the logo on the top.

I wrote my own program specifically to make the corn pattern. Here you see the spline laid out to form the general shape of a corn saddle. Splines are easy to work with, all I had to do here was click 8 points along the curve.

I then run a batch operation where I choose the 3 colors to use and I tell it to make 100 more of them. I can set all kinds of parameters, such as how much to vary the blotches, how thick to make the borders, etc.


	When it does this, it takes the original saddle, distorts it, then draws an outline around it. It fills in the saddle with the saddle color, red. Next the outline with the outline color, black. Then it fills in the background with the background color, orange. Before running the operation, I had the program split the blotch into 500 points instead of 8.

	Finally, it randomly chooses a bunch of places in the picture and “speckles” it (draws big splotches of variations of the main color) to give it a more spotty appearance, because a perfectly clean image looks way too fake when you use it as a texture. The final result looks a lot more organic, and realistic, than a solid-colored smooth-lined picture. To do all this in a paint program would have been at least as much work as it took to write the program. And now I can make all kinds of variations on the theme, such as Amel, Anery, Miami, etc.

The program then spits out a series of images which I have to go through and choose which ones to keep. I put those all in a separate folder and run a second program I wrote, which splices them all together into a single HUGE image. The navigation bar on the left is a much-reduced copy of that image.

When the mesh and texture are done, the next things are setting up the lighting and deciding on a camera angle. But the neat part is that once it’s done, you can render images from all kinds of different angles.




This is what it looks like when the program is rendering the image. The white lines are the mesh of the snake. The red lines are a distortion tube I’ve used, so that I can bend the snake model in any way I want. That little red 3-d arrow is one of the light sources, and the blue lines are the simple rectangular meshes used for the paper towels. I got the paper towel textures by simply scanning some paper towels... If you’re really interested in doing your own 3-d modeling, I suggest you pick up a book on it. The process is anti-intuitive to our brains, and takes a LOT of patience to learn. It’s not something you can pick up overnight (took me 6 months to feel halfway comfortable with it) and it’s not anything you can learn by any other way than sitting down and doing it.

All content on this site, unless otherwise noted, is Copyright 2000, Serpentine Widgets. Exceptions to this are the morph pictures, which were generously loaned by helpful corn enthusiasts, and are likely copyrighted by them. The background, banner, and navigation skin are original creations by me...