Welcome to Steaming Hot Java, the online portfolio of (me) James Campanella. This site includes several of the Java applets that I have written as well as some of my photographs I have taken over the years. The site will also include some of my 3D graphics and animations that I have created using Blender a freeware 3D graphics, animation, movie, and game creation program. I have also used POV-Ray a 3D ray tracing program that will create very nice 3D images and animations, but scenes must be created by using the POV-Ray language in a text file, whereas Blender has a user interface that allows you to directly manipulate your 3D objects on screen. POV-Ray also creates truly ray traced images as opposed to Blender that simulates ray traced images by using mathematics and some tricks to speed up rendering, but still maintain realistic looking graphics.
The cup of Steaming Hot Java up in the left hand of this page for my logo was created in Blender, and I wrote a Java applet to sequence through 25 png images to show the animation, however the current animation is done in Flash in order to maintain a transparent background around the cup so the image behind it can display through. I was able to achieve a similar result with the Java applet by having a background image, but it took careful placement of the background image to shift it just right to match the background of the header of this template. Then if someone had a larger or smaller resolution the two images would no longer mesh up and so the "illusion" of transparency was lost. However, the current method is more flexible and I was able to keep a better floating layout and if flash is not enabled a static coffee cup image will display along with a get flash icon and link.