More CSS, Sliding Doors and Drop Downs

Last week I had a bit of a disaster at work and lost a new menu system that I was working on for a client. Today I can say that I have pretty much finished what I lost and also improved it further in the process. Im currently working on improving the Defence Teaming Centre (DTC) webpage and I took the opportunity to upgrade the tab-based menu system at the top of the page. If you have a look at the current page - DTC - you might notice that each tab uses 2 images, one normal one and one for when the mouse hovers over.

Ive modified (havent uploaded modified version yet) the tab-system so that it uses sliding doors and retains the drop-down menu as well. If you want a great tutorial on how to use sliding doors check out A List Apart. My system should be uploaded to the server soon once we have approval of all the changes so if you are interested in seeing how I got drop downs to work with the sliding door technique then check back in a little while.

3D drop pod

Working on a 3D drop pod model at the moment. Inspiration from starship troopers and alien(s). Done most of the back and side and working on the wings at the moment. Im thinking I might create a nice animation for it or I could work backwards and use it as a high-poly reference for a game model. Too many possibilities. Still a fair amount of work to go, but it's taking shape.

Back-end showing wing, hatch and assorted detail.

Wakeskate Part 2

In order to keep the wakeskate symmetrical I drew out a quarter of the board based on my reference images, like so: pic1 goes here, pic2 goes here. I then traced this shape to make the other 3 quarters. A bit of sticky tape later and I had a template I could place over my play. I used a jgsaw and cut out 6 'copies' of the template from the ply.

All I had to do now was glue all the pieces of the board together and I would be done... But its not that simple. Wakeboards and wakeskates have what is called rocker

Wakeskate Part 1

For those of you that dont know, Im a big fan of wakeboarding. Because of this I was also quite keen to have a try on a wakeskate. For those of you that dont know what a wakeskate is, it is a cross between a wakeboard and a skateboard, hence the name. And if you dont know what a wakeboard is then have a look in google. If you dont know what a skateboard is then where have you been all this time? So a wakeskate is shaped similarly to a wakeboard (a little smaller and lighter) with no bindings so that skateboarding style tricks can be performed.

Well, wakeskates aren't cheap, so I thought to myself well how hard can one of these things be to make?

In order to make a wakeskate one must first know how it should look. I browsed a few webpages and got a general idea for the shape. After further research I saw that a large amount of wakeskates were made by sandwiching several sheets of plywood together.
So having drawn up an outline of the board I went to my hardware store to buy some sheets of ply. There were several options here. Normal ply and marine ply. Marine ply would be the obvious choice as the board would spend a large amount of time in the water, however it was much more expensive and as I was doing this project on a budget I went with the 'vanilla' ply. This choice wasnt totally foolish as I planned on using a waterproofer to seal the ply at a later date but more on that later.

So onto the building...