Posted on July 21, 2007

• Added “Circumpolar” to the gallery this morning. I spent far too much time working on this one (as Jessie has been fond of reminding me these past few days). The reason is threefold. two of the my fault. I was learning a new modeling program (Zbrush) and I was learning to use Vue’s subsurface scattering. My knowledge of both is still pretty rough at this point, and I have much to learn, but I think the knowledge will pay big dividends down the road.

  The last problem was beyond my control. It seemed whenever I tried to do my final render it would always come out blocky and smeary looking as if I was using the lowest quality settings. So I would jack up the render settings and try again, causing the next render to take even longer but with the same results. I went through this for about 5 days when I finally found a newly released patch for Vue fixing, you guessed it, blocky renders when using global illumination. Long story short, my program had a bug which caused me to waste 5 days.

  I applied the patch last night and the render finished this morning. I could probably keep fiddling with this image for the rest of my life, but I think it’s time to move on to other projects. Thanks for your patience!

• If you haven’t been to the gallery for the past week or so (and you own an iPhone or similar device) please check out the posts directly below. Also, I’d like to mention that I’ve placed a permanent link for adding “Member Testimonials” (it had fallen down the page and out of view recently). Thanks!