For more than a decade, I've been using a pair of images to represent me on the internets. These two images, Raga and RagaNo date back to at least 2004, and probably a bit longer than that.

I've used them as avatars and desktop backgrounds and iPhone lock screens and who knows what else for almost as long as I can remember... Except they were never mine. I just found them somewhere along the Information Superhighway. At this point... I don't think there's any real way to credit what seems to be the singular creator. Do an image search now and you'll see that they are all over the place for download. Well, I wanted my representation to be my own... so I set out about recreating images of the same style but made entirely by me.

I had a few goals when I started out on this:

• I wanted the same shot/camera angle for both images. I did not have that in the old ones and it always made me sad.
  
• I wanted to use green instead of yellow for the happy sphere
  
• I wanted to see if I could get just a bit more reflection off the spheres without turning them into gleaming ball bearings.

All I needed was a basic 3D program that could do some raytracing-ish rendering, some spheres, and images to use as the colored faces wrapped around those spheres. How hard could it be? Well... this project took about six hours across two days...

For a rendering program I went with Strata Design 3D SE 7 from the Mac App Store. It had two advantages: 1. It was free. 2. I seem to recall playing around in Strata 3D way back in the 90's/2000's, so I was vaguely familiar with it.

Creating a sphere was easy. Unfortunately, controlling the camera and mapping my textures to the spheres... wasn't. Well... it wasn't for me. The camera I never really figured out. One would thing you could move the camera along any axis and then pan, zoom, and rotate... except I never figured out never could really figure out how to move along the Y axis. This made creating and aligning the spheres more difficult than it should have been.

Here's the scene, by the way:

The really hard part was mapping the sphere. Or at least it was a lot more troublesome than I feel it should have been. I'm no 3D artist and I proved that pretty well during this little project. I figure a real 3D artist would make an image to the right dimensions to encircle a sphere and slap it on and be pretty much done. Me? I had to go through like 10+ images of various sizes in a trial and error process until I finally sized the smiley face part small enough on the green/yellow/red/blue background so I could wrap it around the spheres without them repeating or failing to cover parts of the spheres.

Real artist make fantastically complex buildings, or starships, or characters. I could barely wrap a face around a sphere. Figuring out the texture mapping modes wasn't super fun either... not hard... but everything seems to default to infinite repeating which was not what I wanted.

Finally though, after a bunch or trial and error, plus a fun "welp... I guess I didn't save before making those bad changes" moment I got two images I am happy with. My final version have quite a few difference from those old images I started with:

• My new versions have slightly more elongated eyes. They’re a bit more oval-like for just a bit more character.
  
• I also went with a thinner smile, and kinda a quirky one at that. It’s not quite symmetrical and it gives the happy sphere something slightly more than just happy. He’s also a bit wise… or knowing…. or cocky…
  
• The old blue & yellow one is a bit more eye grabbing just because of the yellow-blue contrast, but after staring at my green-blue one I kinda came to like it.
  
• The green being closer to the blue sorta signifies happiness and sadness and the people that are one or the other aren’t quite so far apart.
  
• The red sphere, likewise, isn’t just sad. The slightly more darkened/burnt color thanks to the different lighting angle and the quirky smile speak just slightly more to discouragement combined with sadness.
  
• Finally, the old images had quite a bit of depth of field blurring which does look kinda neat but was also a bit unnecessary with the new angle I settled on.

And, here they are: (Click to embiggen)

I also made cropped square versions for various uses.

Now all I've gotta do is change all my avatars across the vastness of cyberspace!