Posted on November 10, 2011

A few items to report today.

First, I have good news and bad news regarding my latest render. The good news is that I’ve added “Neptune’s Garden” to the Members Gallery this afternoon. The bad news? Let me explain…

I’ve always loved underwater scenes and was thrilled to learn that Vue 10 had a new water rendering engine. I’ve worked on this scene for about a week through quite a few different revisions. Light and color behave differently underwater and this has been a learning experience for me.

My latest render finished this morning and I would say that I am around 80% happy with it. I started in to fixing the last 19% (mostly changing some of the colors on the corals and adding some misc sealife) when tragedy struck. Vue crashed and for some strange reason refused to reopen the scene file that I had just saved 15 minutes before. The backup appears to be corrupted too. What’s up with that?

Fortunately my kids were at school when it happened because I get in trouble when I swear in front of them.

Anyway, I am talking with the folks at e-onsoftware about investigating what happened to my file. They asked me to send it to them but I am not hopeful. I decided to post what I had while I waited to see what could be done about my broken scene. 80% is better than nothing after all. In the meantime I guess I will try to recreate what I can.

Second, I am increasing my regular 20% military discount to 30% in honor of Veterans Day. Active and retired military (of any nationality) may use the coupon code “liberty” to get the discount on all new Memberships and Renewals. The offer is valid until midnight 11/11.

Third, I wanted to mention that I have added two free browser themes for Chrome. You can check them out here. They were coded by Pim Vermeyden last year and have been available for Members only until now. I hope you enjoy them!

Lastly, I have added the “Mystic Halo” Live Wallpaper to the Amazon App Store for Android. It is currently the #5 paid theme and I would love to see it go to #1 (that seems to bring in a lot of sales all by itself). The app is only $.99 and can also be found in the Android Marketplace. Hopefully we will have one ready for Christmas…