Archive for year: 2018

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/08/1000-smashing-members/

We Are Just Getting Started: 1,000 Smashing Members

We Are Just Getting Started: 1,000 Smashing Members

Vitaly Friedman

2018-08-03T13:50:31+02:00
2018-08-06T08:19:27+00:00

We’ve all been there: bringing a new product to the market is a tough nut to crack. It requires patience, commitment, and a bit of healthy stubbornness. That’s the exact attitude we started off with when we launched our shiny new Smashing Membership last October — a friendly and respectful community that keeps this website alive, along with books, webinars, discounts, networking, and a seasoned selection of fancy cats.

Thanks to the generous support of Smashing Members, we’re incredibly honored to have crossed the 1,000 members mark today. This is a very important day for us, and frankly, it’s quite flattering to see 1,000 people actively supporting our little site and sharing our goals. In fact, with Membership, sometimes it feels like walking around a small town in which everyone knows each other and their friends, and so we know many members by name, and we’ve also met some of them at Smashing Conferences. It’s a wonderful family that shares similar values and wants to get better at their work. But it’s also a family that wants to bring along a shift in the industry.

The People Behind The Scenes

When looking at obscure avatars and nicknames appearing in remote corners of the web, it’s easy to forget that there are actually real people behind them. That’s why it was important for us that the Membership experience is focused around real names and real faces of the community members — both on the new Smashing Magazine website and in our Membership Slack channel. It’s the people who shape the community and make it feel like home, and so Membership should become a humane product, with approachable and friendly authors, contributors and attendees.

We reached out to a few members to ask them why out of all the wonderful resources on the web, they chose to support the red, cat-friendly, and quirky Smashing Magazine, and what they found useful or remarkably painful during their Membership so far.

Allen Brady

Allen is based in Knoxville, TN. He is passionate about building great experiences on the web for companies and their audiences. Currently he is learning to make the web more accessible with great HTML, CSS and inclusive design.

“I wanted to support Smashing Magazine as soon as they launched their membership program because not only have they been an excellent resource over the years with all the fantastic articles, books and conferences, but also because they’re so great at amplifying the voices in this industry, which is really important. I know that with my membership I’m getting a diverse range of perspectives that’s really helped shape me into a better developer.

The best part about this membership is the community. There’s a fantastic Slack group where you can talk about your projects, ask for help or just chat about whatever. The webinars have also been great. My favorite part is that we get to chat with the hosts and each other during the live recording. Involving the community in everything they can seems to be a theme with Smashing Magazine. It sets them apart from other resources out there and I love it.”

Verena Vertonghen

Verena’s journey in the development world started 6 years ago. She studied Multimedia Technology with a specialisation in Web&UX in Antwerp.

“Now I’m a front-end developer who also picks up some design challenges from time to time. I love creating all sorts of things and going on walks with my dogs. Because Smashing Magazine has been an invaluable learning resource for me throughout my studies and my career. I decided on membership to support the continuation of all the great work that Smashing Magazine already offers. But also because you get even more goodies when you do.

Some of the things I really like about it are the eBooks, previews to articles, webinars and the Slack channel that gives me the opportunity to connect with people that have a similar profile. The user experience is overall really great, and SmashingMag cat mascot gives a very playful and personal vibe!”

Emily Serven

Emily is a recent college graduate and new member of the workforce. In her spare time, she like practicing photography, listening to foreign music, and occasionally playing Overwatch.

“I remember checking SmashingMag regularly as far back as middle school and have always loved the quality and steady quantity of content. I know I can trust the quality of writing on Smashing (especially considering there’s so much content and noise from other places to sift through nowadays)!

I’m also a cat person, for sure. I’ve found the available resources to be really useful (eBook library and book discounts), and I can’t wait for the printed magazine to come out. That’s the other thing about Smashing; even though the medium in which I express my work as a web dev is primarily digital, Smashing still recognizes the value of well-produced and attractive physical media. I love getting the physical books for that reason.

Oh, another thing. I used to freelance more back in middle school until I got my full-time position recently. When I found Smashing for the first time, I really loved how it really ‘got’ me and my job. There was coding, but also design (Photoshop, UX, etc.) and freelance articles specifically. It all felt very well balanced. I think that helped me develop my dev skills and the other auxiliary talents in a way that led to my holistic view of dev nowadays, too.

Arthur Leonov

Arthur is a product designer that also codes front-end. He is a firm believer that merging design and technology can solve even the most difficult problems.

“I’m a designer that codes front-end. What a combo, right? I also believe that merging design and technology can solve even the most difficult problems in this world. The Smashing community keeps me inspired and informed day in and day out.

I catch up on SmashingMag every morning because it is one of the few online magazines in this industry who puts a lot of emphasis on good quality, relevant, and practical content.”

It might sound like an overstatement, but these people have already made a difference. They’ve helped us initiate projects that we wouldn’t be able to support otherwise. Now, don’t get me wrong: with dwindling ad revenues facing us, of course our aim was to earn enough with the help of the Membership to keep the magazine independent and self-funded. But that’s just one side of the story. Our aim was also to support design education and new voices in the industry; reward great people doing great work; foster open, diverse, inclusive and accessible initiatives. Last but not least, we wanted to help community events and projects, and the people behind them.

Did we achieve any of these goals with the money we’ve earned? I’m glad you asked.

So How Much Money Did We Earn? Total: $33,128

Initially, we were hoping to provide a larger financial support for new design/tech education initiatives and open-source projects, but with limited resources we had to be more realistic and pragmatic. We reached 1,013 Smashing Members in 257 days, with 30 supporters, 562 members, and 421 smashers. That makes a current total of $6,689 gross per month for August 2019.

Since the launch of the Membership, Smashing Members contributed a total of $33,128 net over the course of 10 months (including current month):

Month
Net revenue

Total
$33,128

November 2017
$1,104

December 2017
$1,530

January 2018
$2,130

February 2018
$2,181

March 2018
$2,748

April 2018
$4,015

May 2018
$4,440

June 2018
$4,750

July 2018
$4,990

August 2018
$5,240

It goes without saying that these kind contributions massively helped us cover monthly costs, from maintenance to honorarium for authors, in particular:

Honorarium for authors contributing articles and chapters for Smashing Magazine, our eBooks and printed books,
Honorarium for reviewers, editors, proofreaders, illustrator Ricardo Gimenes and front-end developer Ilya Pukhalski,
Honorarium for all webinar speakers,
All design education initiatives and community support is enabled by Smashing Membership,
All money was reinvested in the Magazine and Membership projects.

From day one, we kept things fully transparent; we’ve been sharing monthly reports on how much money we’ve earned and how we spent it. So here’s what happened since the launch of Membership last year.

Smashing TV: 24 Live Sessions

Each month, we are proud to host 2 curated webinars for Smashing Members. We’ve teamed up with active members of the community to run 1:1 interactive sessions with Smashing Members. Overall, we ran 24 Smashing TV webinars on front-end, UX, ethics, performance, accessibility and design workflow. With Marcy Sutton, Val Head, Dan Rose, Ada Rose Cannon, Martin Splitt, Michael Riethmueller, Sara Soueidan, dina Amin, Rachel Andrew and Dan Mall, among others.

The goal of every session is to be highly practical and provide actionable insights and learnings — be it in front-end or in user experience. Everyone can also suggest topics for upcoming webinars in the Membership Slack channel, and we’ll invite speakers to cover the topic. Of course, live recordings of these sessions are available as well, and are later released publicly for free for everybody.

Smashing TV: “Smashing Big Bang Redesign” with Vitaly Friedman

Design/Tech Courses And Trainings

These days there is always something to do, learn, or wrap your head around these days, and because all of us tend to get lost in small details, video tutorials and courses can be quite helpful. There are of course huge video course platforms which are wonderful, but there are also many fantastic one-man-show-teachers out there in the community who produce courses and tutorials for everybody to learn from.

That’s why we’ve teamed up with some of these teachers to provide community discounts for training and video courses. For example, for a “Debugging” course run by Remy Sharp, or “DevTools Web Performance Course” by Umar Hansa, or “CSS Layouts Course” by Rachel Andrew or “React/ES6” courses by Wes Bos — with many more courses coming up over the next months.

Supporting Community Initiatives

It’s not easy to maintain and grow a community, and we are proud to help community initiatives around the world to connect like-minded designers and developers.

Here are the projects we’ve supported so far:

Prjctr Design School (Kiev, Ukraine),
MinskCSS/MinskJS (Minsk, Belarus),
UX Salon (Tel-Aviv, Israel),
WebdeLDN (London, UK),
Osijek Digital Design Academy (Osijek, Croatia),
New Digital School (Porto, Portugal),
Ladies that UX Berlin (Berlin, Germany),
UX Day (Amsterdam, Netherlands),
ExConf Bratislava (Bratislava, Slovakia),
Kyiv ReactJS Meetup (Kyiv, Ukraine),
Ladies That UX Amsterdam (Amsterdam, Netherlands),
PiterCSS (Moscow, Russia),
DesignX (Toronto, Canada),
Local communities in Kairo, Egypt.

If you are running a meet-up or a community in your city, we’d be happy to support you as well. Just drop us a line and tell us a bit about your community, and we’ll make it happen!

Smashing Book 6: New Frontiers In Web Design

It took us a while, but we are almost there. The brand new Smashing Book 6 is coming out early September, with contributions by Laura Elizabeth, Marcy Sutton, Rachel Andrew, Mike Riethmuller, Harry Roberts, Lyza Gardner, Yoav Weiss, Adrian Zumbrunnen, Greg Nudelman, Ada Rose Cannon, and yours truly.

It explores common pain points and solutions from real-world projects: be it accessibility in times of single-page apps, performance loading patterns, making design systems work in real-life, AR/VR, responsive art-direction, building an advanced service worker and designing for next-gen interfaces. A book packed with practical advice for designers and developers alike, designed and illustrated by Chiara Aliotta.

Smashing Book 6 is coming. Shipping of the book will start late September, but you can already start reading the first chapters if you order your copy today. (Large preview)

The book is being finished as we speak, but we’ve been slowly releasing chapters, so Members can actually start reading the book already before its official release. All new books and eBooks — as well as upcoming Smashing Print magazine (currently in the works) — is made available for Members free of charge. But that goes without saying, doesn’t it?

Smashing Diversity Program

There is a huge amount of discrimination out there, and not everybody is getting a fair chance even though they deserve one. That’s why we’ve launched a Smashing Diversity program, providing conference and workshop tickets for students, non-profits, and people who might not be able to afford a conference ticket or attend a workshop. We also make sure that our conference volunteers can attend the sessions they’d love to see.

Beyond that, please ping us if there is a way we can help you become a better speaker. To support and encourage new voices in the industry, I’ll be heading to Paris for Mozilla’s Tech Speaker program to provide mentorship, training, and opportunities to up-and-coming speakers from all over the world.

Support New Wave Of Digital Education

Tiego Pedras and Sara Ramos run the New Digital School, a new design education initiative in Porto, Portugal. In fact, they spoke about their project at SmashingConf Freiburg last year. Their goal is to provide students with better front-end and design education to be ready for real-life world.

Each group of students had their own project to work on at The New Digital School. (Image source: Tiago Pedras) (Large preview)

Students presented their projects and shared their results with the group. (Image source: Tiago Pedras) (Large preview)

For two years in a row now, I was honored to be able to explore the current state of front-end, interface design, and responsive art-direction with students from all over the world. In February this year, I headed to Porto to spend a week with students from India, Malaysia, Portugal, France and USA for an entire week. Each group of students was working on their own project, ranging from interactive VR storytelling to (hello, Miguel and Sarthak!) to Olympics leaderboards (and hello to you, Prashant and Marissa!).

It might not sound like a big deal, but it was so rewarding to see the sparkle in the eyes of the students as they were working on their projects. Being able to provide an experience that hopefully many students will remember was a huge privilege and a remarkable moment in the entire experience. And it was all possible thanks to the contributions of our Smashing Members. I couldn’t be more proud of this effort.

Berlin Design Campus

Late June is usually quite slow, with most projects slowly fading into sleep mode. Well, it was quite the opposite for us. For June, we teamed up with Prjctr Design School (Kyiv, Ukraine) to run Berlin Design Campus — a week-long trip to Berlin to explore digital design agencies and studios with students from Ukraine. It was our first initiative to improve design education by setting up a project of our own.

We visited the offices of Mozilla (thanks, Emanuela and Amin!), SinnerSchrader (thanks, Martin!), EdenSpiekermann (thanks, Daniel!), Hort (thanks, Eike!), Fjord (thanks, Simon and Jake!), Contentful (thanks, Ben!), Matteo Cevucci (previously EdenSpiekermann, Thoughtworks) with hands-on workshops in those companies throughout the week.

We couldn’t be more proud to team up with Prjctr Design School from Kiev, Ukraine who are trying change the education landscape in Kiev, Ukraine, and London. Visuals were designed by the Prjctr team as well. (Image source) (Large preview)

We visited both design agencies and larger consultancy firms, spoke with local freelancers, artists and entrepreneurs. We’ve set up informal evening meetings in which students could ask questions, and we organized visits to offices so students could see how other professionals work. It was a fascinating week with practical insights you would never get otherwise; a look behind the scenes in actual real-life projects with early prototypes that failed and hands-on exercises to work on.

During Berlin Design Campus, we visited a number of offices in Berlin. One of them was Mozilla’s office, with a hands-on workshop by Amin al Hazwani. (Image source) (Large preview)

You never get to visit or see how designers in those respected companies work, and what their processes look like. So happy and honored to be a part of this little initiative, and looking forward to more adventures in the future. Again, made possible through contributions of wonderful Smashing Members.

New SmashingConf Experience

With a few more resources available to us, we were able to focus on exploring new formats for Smashing Conferences. Being inspired by our Italian friends from the NoSlidesConf, we tested a brand new format in Toronto earlier this year: interactive live sessions in which speakers were not allowed to use slides (be it Powerpoint, Keynote or Reveal.js). Instead, we encouraged speakers to show how they work, how they design and build, what their setup looks like, and give audience insights into how they think as they make progress in their work.

One of those unforgettable moments. When Gemma O’Brien brought her entire studio to SmashingConf Toronto, a conference where speakers weren’t allowed to use slides. We’ll be rolling out this format at all Smashing events in 2019. (Image credit: Marc Thiele) (Large preview)

Instead of speaking in front of a podium, we set up a coffee shop-alike setting with speakers sitting at the desk and literally walking the audience through their thought process. It was a quite special event. Some speakers felt challenged and excited about the new format, and attendees appreciated the fact that every session was unique and pushed the speakers outside their comfort zones. That’s why we’ll be rolling out this format for SmashingConf 2019, along with lightning talks, design nights, and a book exchange board. It goes without saying: all Smashing Members are getting a heavy discount on all Smashing Conferences.

Giving Back To The Community

Of course, Smashing Magazine has always been free, but with Rachel Andrew joining us on board last year, we now have a strong and keen Editor-in-Chief focusing on getting the best articles out there every single day. Since then, we’ve published 87 articles — all thoroughly reviewed and edited by the Smashing Editorial team. We refocus back on the heart of it all — yours truly Smashing Magazine.

We are committed to make the content we get out there accessible to as many people as possible. That goes for our eBooks as well. That’s why we also publicly released “Inclusive Design Patterns” eBook by Heydon Pickering (PDF, ePUB, Amazon Kindle), a wonderful book on inclusive design patterns — for free. Why? Because accessibility matters.

We Are Just Getting Started

1,000 is a first major milestone for us. Not many people know it, but the entire Smashing team is actually quite small, with just 13 of us floating from one project to another. Frankly, we might be a bit slow at times, but we are trying our best to bring along a positive change to our industry.

We need less craziness and narrow-mindedness around us, and we need more respect, care, and constructive help. That’s the goal we are aiming to provide with the Smashing Membership, with our next projects, and with your help. There might be something in it for you, too. We are in it for a long game. We are, after all, just getting started.

Huge thank you to Cosima Mielke for helping with preparations of this article, and Scott Whitehead for his kind support and work on the Smashing Membership. You are truly smashing!

(cm, sw, il)

With so much happening on the web, what should we really pay attention to? At SmashingConf New York 2018 ?? we’ll explore everything from PWAs, font loading best practices, web performance and eCommerce UX optimization, to refactoring CSS, design workflows and convincing your clients. With Sarah Drasner, Dan Mall, Sara Soueidan, Jason Grigsby, and many other speakers. Oct 23–24.

Check the speakers →

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/08/5-ways-to-keep-designing-when-the-power-is-out/

There’s a certain peace to be found at night, when the world goes dark and silent. You might settle down on the couch for a moment, and just soak in the absence of noise and bustle. However, if you’re at work, and the world goes dark and silent, it’s a lot less comforting.

At the very least, it means a delay in your work. If you’re a freelancer, that could very well mean a delay in getting paid. It’s stressful, and it can happen anywhere, to anyone. First world countries can’t always prevent power-outs. Countries like Mexico can set their clocks by them. How do you know it’s rainy season? The power’s out. Oh, and the rain.

Now, this isn’t always a terrible thing. A break might be just what you need to gather your thoughts, relax, and get ready to work like mad when the power’s back. Or, you know, you might just relocate to a place that has power and wi-fi, if that’s an option.

But what if it isn’t? Let’s say all of your machines are desktops, and you’re expected to stay in the office. I mean, power-outs don’t usually last all day. And maybe you have a tight deadline. How can you stay busy, and perhaps actually make some progress before the lights come back? Well, let’s start with the more practical ideas:

1. Brainstorm

If you’re lucky, or at least less unlucky, then this is happening during the planning stages of your design and development cycle. So start planning. There’s nothing stopping you from grabbing your coworkers (if you’re not a one-person studio), and brainstorming the time away. Throw some ideas around!

Now, assuming you already have some plans, you could go over them. Well, if you printed them. Or, go back and revisit ideas that you might have decided to talk about later. Well, it’s later now, and you don’t have anything better to do.

Go over the core of your current plans, see how they could be improved. With the ability to jump straight into the work taken away from you, you might see something you missed, or you might come up with something better.

2. Wireframe on Paper

Now, assuming this isn’t already a part of your process, grab a pencil and some paper, and start drawing out ideas fast. If you’ve already done some of the actual mockup work, try drawing out bits of the interface from memory. Use these drawings in your brainstorming session to see if you can’t come up with something better.

If you already have some hand-drawn wireframes, haul them out and keep iterating. Even if you don’t use the new or updated designs, they might help you to remember why you made certain design decisions in the first place. If nothing else, affirmation is motivating.

3. Develop a Paper Prototype

If you have a lot of downtime, why not try your hand at some arts and crafts? Paper prototypes are basically layers of paper designed to imitate a digital interface. Putting one together will give you a prototype you can actually touch and (to a very limited extent) interact with. All you really need is a paper, a pen(cil), and some scissors. Heck, work on it enough, and perhaps you could show it to your boss or clients later, to help answer any questions they might have.

Here’s a great article on how to make paper prototypes, with examples.

4. Grab a Book

Okay, so you’ve done all the planning you’re ever going to do. Or there’s no point because the plan has gotten sign-off from above, and everything is set in corporate stone, for now at least. What next? Grab a book. Specifically grab a book on web design, typography, accessibility, branding, graphics, or anything else you can imagine!

And don’t let anyone tell you that continuing to educate yourself, grounding yourself in basic principles, or just seeking inspiration isn’t a practical thing to do. The results will show themselves when the power comes back on, and you tackle the project with new vigor, and perhaps some new insight.

5. Try your hand at predicting the future

Okay, I am not one of those guys who will tell you that visualizing success is the key to achieving it. Doing stuff and not sucking at it is mostly the key to success. However, taking some time to visualize the future of what you’re building is still a useful thing to do in small doses. Just sit there, alone or with colleagues, and imagine the thing is already built. Picture your users, and the way they might integrate your product into their lives. Make it a meditative thing.

Spend five minutes on this if you’re a normal person. If you’re an over-thinker like me, maybe schedule a solid hour. Either way, you may very well come out of this exercise with a renewed will to make it happen. Or better yet, you might identify some previously unforeseen issues, and address them before they ever become a problem.

And hey, this is something you can do even if you don’t have enough natural light for most of the other things on this list.

Conclusion

A power-out doesn’t mean your work has to come to a complete, screeching halt. Mind you, it’s not a terrible thing if it does. Unexpected breaks are good for people. But if you just have to keep going, you can often make tangible progress with a little creativity. Otherwise, you can at least make sure you’re ready to tackle your work with a vengeance as soon as the lights come back on.

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Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-build-a-coach-holiday-showcase-with-wrld/

This article was created in partnership with WRLD. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Since the late 2000s, maps have been a staple of the web, and today are more ubiquitous than ever. They have a variety of uses, from complementing a company’s contact page to plotting places of interest across a geographic region. As computing power is becoming more affordable, 3D maps have gained popularity, demonstrating the scale of buildings and the nature of the surrounding terrain, adding a touch of novelty to such experiences, as well as providing practical benefits.

One such provider of 3D maps is WRLD. Major cities such as New York, London, Paris and Bangkok have been generated in 3D using real geographic data. This data can be used to author custom maps containing points of interest and other useful metadata, and thanks to their Leaflet-driven JavaScript library, it’s possible to drop them into a web page with a few lines of code; this workflow will be the focus of our article.

Using WRLD’s map designer, we will build a map for a coach holiday, which we will then integrate into a Node.js-powered website.

Getting Started

Before we can use WRLD’s map designer, we must register. Sign in once you’ve created and verified your account.

Navigate to the Map Designer. This page will list any maps that you have created, as well as allowing you to create new ones. Click on Create Map to launch the designer.

Together, we’re going to create a map for a Dundee food tour. Click New Map on the left and in the resultant New Map modal, enter a title of Dundee Food Tour and then hit Confirm New Map.

Now that we’ve created our map, we need to choose a starting location. Click the menu button next to the search input, click Locations, and choose Dundee.

Adding Our First Place

To add locations to our map, we have to use WRLD’s Places Designer, which facilitates the creation of place sets that can then be imported and reused.

On the right, click the place marker icon, followed by Manage Place Collections. This will open the designer at the same geographical location. Let’s add our first places collection by clicking New Places Collection. Set the title to Dundee Food Tour and then add a reference to our Dundee Food Tour app, which will link the places collection with our map. Finalise this with Confirm New Collection.

Click New Place Marker next to the search box. A marker should appear on the Googleplex building, but it can be dragged into place if necessary. In the pane on the right, enter a title of Googleplex — this will save automatically.

Add as many places as you’d like following this approach, and return to the Map Designer once you feel that you have enough. Our new collection should have been detected and automatically included in our map, but we can configure this manually by clicking the places marker on the right and selecting our place set.

Before we display the map on our website, we should set a starting point. Drag and zoom the map until you’ve found an optimal view, then, using the crosshair icon on the right, open the Opening Map View form and click Use Current Map View.

Including the Map on a Website

Despite the impressively-detailed 3D modelling provided by WRLD, the real power of this platform is the ability to embed maps into websites and other applications. As well as exposing a variety of HTTP APIs for directly querying data, there are libraries for rendering maps on many platforms, including iOS, Android, and the web. We will use the wrld.js library, which is also available on npm.

Setting Up

The boilerplate website to which we will add our map can be found at GitHub. Please clone this repository and install the required dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/jamesseanwright/wrld-tours.git
cd wrld-tours
nvm install # this will install the version of Node.js found in .nvmrc. Make sure nvm is installed
npm i

To verify that the project works as expected, run npm run watch; this will start the project using nodemon, restarting automatically when any changes are made. Upon opening http://localhost:8001/trips in your browser, you should see a list of trips with a sole item.

Grabbing and Configuring your Developer Token

Our application will consume data from two of WRLD’s HTTP APIs, which are protected by developer tokens. To acquire your token, sign in and head over to the My Account section, and click the Developer Token tab; make sure you copy it.

In our app’s codebase, open config.json in the server directory, and paste your token as the value of devToken; this property will be used to make the aforemntioned API calls covered in the next step.

{
“devToken”: “insert your dev token here”
}

Calling WRLD’s HTTP APIs

Open the project in your editor, and head to the trips.json file in the server directory. This is a hash map of all of the available trips listed on our website, keyed by a hyphen-separated slug. These are accessible via the /trips route, so we can reach the Dundee Food Tour via /trips/dundee-food-tour. You’ll notice that the entry for the Dundee Food Tour has two empty properties, mapSceneId and poiSetId. We will return to this shortly.

Let’s take a look at the client-side code that fetches the map data. Open TripView.js (not TripViews.js) in the client/views directory and study the onNavigatedTo method. This calls two endpoints that are provided to the client by the server:

const [mapScene, poiSet] = await Promise.all([
callEndpoint(endpoints.mapScene),
callEndpoint(endpoints.poiSet),
]);

These don’t directly point to the WRLD APIs. Rather, they are exposed by our own server so that our developer token is not leaked to the browser. Let’s take a look at these routes in server/apiRouter.js:

router.get(‘/mapscenes/:id’, (req, res) => {
res.status(404).send();
});

router.get(‘/pois/:poiSetId’, (req, res) => {
res.status(404).send();
});

Currently, they behave as if they do not exist. To implement them, we can use the already-imported request module to forward our requests to the respective WRLD APIs and stream this back to the browser:

router.get(‘/mapscenes/:id’, (req, res) => {
request.get(`https://wrld.mp/v1.1/mapscenes/${req.params.id}?token=${config.devToken}`)
.pipe(res);
});

router.get(‘/pois/:poiSetId’, (req, res) => {
request.get(`https://poi.wrld3d.com/v1.1/poisets/${req.params.poiSetId}/pois/?token=${config.devToken}`)
.pipe(res);
});

Whenever the client-side JavaScript is evaluated for a trip, it will call these endpoints with the relevant IDs, keeping the developer token away from the browser.

Verifying Our Endpoints

To check that this has worked, we can call our own API endpoints directly. To get the respective IDs for our mapscene and place collection, we can call the WRLD APIs directory with our developer token, i.e.:

https://wrld.mp/v1.1/mapscenes/?token=[your dev token]
https://poi.wrld3d.com/v1.1/poisets/?token=[your dev token]

We can then take the id properties and pass them to our own local endpoints e.g. http://localhost:8001/api/mapscenes/10786 and http://localhost:8001/api/pois/4149. If we have implemented these routes correctly, then we should receive data from the WRLD APIs.

Updating the Trip Definition

Return to the trips.json file. Remember the two empty properties, mapSceneId and poiSetId? Set their respective values to the IDs you took for the mapscene and place collection e.g.:

“mapSceneId”: “10597”,
“poiSetId”: “4160”

Rendering the Map

We’re now ready to plot the API data onto a browser-rendered map. Let’s return to the TripView.js file.

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Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/c1Rs3-ufnn4/occlusion-shadows-121518571

Occlusion shadows help to push the three-dimensional feeling of what you’re painting. Look for areas enclosed by surfaces and notice how the shadows are always darker there

When doing detailed lighting work I’ve gotten into the habit of simplifying each step of the painting process as much as possible. Focusing my attention on one aspect at a time helps to not become overwhelmed and almost always results in a much more thorough job.

One step in that process is concentrating on occlusion shadows, which occur where surfaces come together. A basic rule of thumb is that wherever areas are closed in by surfaces, shadows will occur. The inside of a mouth or an eye socket for instance will almost always be darker than the top of the nose or the forehead.

They’re a form of shadows best noticeable when there’s no directional light present. So you can paint them on a separate layer without having to worry about the direction of the overall lighting, and then set that layer to Multiply to have it distribute the shadows on the objects below. In my example however, I do have a lighting scheme in mind with directional lights and cast shadows, but these build upon the occlusion shadows rather than replacing them.

01. Start simple

 Every good painting starts with a good foundation. In this case it’s a quick line drawing that looks very simple, but has all the information in it I need to finish the painting. It shows the placing of all the facial features, but also where the cast shadows will fall and how the back lighting will push the silhouette forward.

02. Use occlusion layer

Built upon the previous sketch is the occlusion layer. You’ll notice that it’s a very bright layer with light greyish tones in it, and the reason for that is that we don’t want to overdo the shadows in the image. By keeping this layer light the Multiply layer won’t ‘burn’ my friendly-looking orc character below.

03. Build it up

With the occlusion layer in Multiply I paint over the line drawing with larger strokes to erase the big lines while keeping the major volumes. The lines aren’t really needed since the layout of the elements is present in the occlusion layer, too. The heavy lifting is now mostly done and all that remains is adding colour and effects.

Words: Bram Sels

Bram is a freelance illustrator and concept designer. He has worked for companies such as Ubisoft, Axis Animation, 3DTotal and Wideshot Entertainment. This article originally appeared in ImagineFX issue 128.

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