Beacon (Night)

Posted on January 10, 2025

Happy Friday!

I thought it would be fun to create a darker, night version of my updated “Beacon” for those folks who prefer the night-mode desktops.   I still wanted to go with the red and blue theme but have lowered the sunlight angle and intensity dramatically.   Maybe only one of these belongs in the gallery and the other in the Pickle Jar?   What do you think?? 

Beacon (2025)

Posted on January 8, 2025

I was recently preparing a “Throwback Thursday” post on social media and I came across “Beacon” from 1998.   As sometimes happens when I look at those old projects I started thinking about how I might do things differently with my current toolset.    I used Plant Factory to create the beacon this time because it excels at radial modeling.   I used Gaea2.0 for the environment and VUE for the render.   The camera setup is a bit different this time around but I wanted this scene to hint at a larger story than the original. 

I hope you enjoy it!

PS: Have you joined the Digital Blasphemy Discord server?? DB Members can now connect their DB accounts with their Discord accounts. Your Membership status will display on the server (your name will be color coded) and in the future I hope to have comments made on images here be mirrored on Discord to hopefully stoke more discussion. We are thinking up other ways to leverage Discord and welcome any ideas from folks who use it more than I do.

The DB API is open for testing!

Posted on January 3, 2025

I’m very pleased to announce that the Digital Blasphemy API (Application Programming Interface) is ready for public testing! I’d written a simple API for DB 1.0 that allowed for the creation of mobile apps and integration into third party programs like Display Fusion and Multimonitor Wallpaper. That system, unfortunately, broke when I moved to this new platform.

Cris has been working very hard for the past couple of months to create a new API that will work with DB 2.0 and it’s now finally ready to show the world! The API will allow developers to access and display my entire gallery as well as enable the posting of reviews and ratings by Members. Membership creation and management will still go through this site however.

We’ve created a sandbox website for you to practice with (use your DB credentials to login).

The documentation for the API can be found here.

An API endpoint for testing can be found here.

I’m excited to see what folks create with this. DB 2.0 works pretty well on mobile now but this opens up the possibility of a new mobile app. We shall see. I know lots of folks are wanting my work to be available through Display Fusion again and this is what will make it possible.

More information will be available soon but if you are a developer please feel free to dig in!

Rhapsody

Posted on December 29, 2024

One last render for 2024 and I’m returning here to the techniques I used to create “Passel” in Cinema4D.   My main goal was to experiment with the turbulence that creates the waves to see what other sorts of geometries I could create.   I also wanted to use a color scheme centered around black (though I think I ventured a bit from this goal in the end) and introduce some depth-of-field blur to the mix. 

Passel was one of my favorite abstracts from 2024 and I would like to explore the technique in full. I hope you enjoy it!!

Massive thank you to everyone who helped support my work this year! This was my 25th year making my living from these wallpapers and it’s been an amazing journey. I couldn’t have done it without your help and I am eternally grateful. It wasn’t without some massive challenges (such as having nearly half of my subscriber payment methods deleted by my merchant bank) but I survived.

Next year I plan to lean more into Cinema4D and possibly (finally) learn to use Unreal Engine as a replacement for VUE. I may even (finally) upgrade my workstation to a GPU rendering system (rather than the CPU rendering system I’ve been using).

I hope you have enjoyed my work this year and continue to decorate your desktop with DB wallpapers in 2025!!

Christmas Glow

Posted on December 20, 2024

My Christmas theme for 2024 has been decorating some of my favorite scenes and here’s one last render before the holidays.   “A Christmas in Paradise” last year opened my eyes to the possibilities of Holiday settings outside the stereotypical snowy north and looking at my “Starglow” scene from September gave me the idea to light up the palm tree in festive multicolored lights.   Sort of a counterpoint to “Christmas Ethereal“.   

It took be a bit longer than I would have liked to get the lights right as I wanted them to be more “multicolored” than I’ve attempted before.    Experimented with many different methods before settling on what you see here. 

I hope you enjoy it wherever in the world you are and that you all have a wonderful holiday!!