8192 Page Views

As I communicated previously, I got the idea to switch all my page view milestones to powers of 2, instead of the usual 10k, 25k, 50k, etc. This allows me to be a bit more original (how many other DA users do you know commemorate powers of 2 or other peculiar milestones?), yet the milestones are still spread out in an ever-increasing fashion, just like typical milestones. This means my next milestone (as suggested in this picture) is 16384 page views, NOT 10000 page views. This means that anyone who tries to grab page view #10000 and show it to me will get nothing.

But anyway, now to describe what I did for this milestone. I decided to make a 3D model of a road stretching off into the distance, with highway-style road signs over it (complete with supporting structure), one indicating an exit 8192 and one suggesting exit 16384. My original intention was to make something that wasn't too complicated, but like all my other 3D models, I ended up putting more detail into the scene than was really necessary, viz. on the road sign structure. It took me three iterations to successfully create the structure on the back of the road signs, which can be seen here.

As with "Romantic Dinner Together", I decided the picture didn't look complete until I added a few effects in Photoshop. What I did was add a dark flat-color layer to make the scene appear set at night, then a few spotlight-style lighting effects over the road signs to look like the lights mounted on the structure were illuminating the signs. Then I just generated noise in the background and tweaked its brightness/contrast to make stars, then filled in a white circle with clouds and bas relief filters to give it a cratered look, plus an outer glow.