Posted on October 2, 2015

“Shades of Autumn” is the third Fall themed image that I’ve been working on recently. I actually started this one first but the background took an awfully long time to render (even on Shadowfax!). You may remember the preview I posted on my Instagram account 3 weeks ago.

The basic idea was to take the techniques that I used to create “Red and Gold” and some of my more complex Vue d’Esprit tree objects and go the next step by using my Plant Factory to create even more detailed branches. I will leave it up to you to decide if I’ve made any improvements on the technique.

The background was created using World Machine and my work on that part of the scene ultimately lead to the “Autumn Cliffs” render that I posted earlier this week. They are, in fact, different mountains but the same techniques were used.

Will I do any more Autumn scenes this year? Maybe. Next I want to create some scary looking trees for Halloween…

My iOS app is finally available!

Thanks to DB Member Jeff Richards (who so kindly volunteered his time because he loves my artwork) there is finally a working DB iOS app available. It’s free to download and offers mobile sized versions of my entire free gallery which can only be downloaded through the App. It doesn’t have all the features that I would like yet (no commenting or rating of images for example) but you can browse my gallery, download images (everything if you are a Member) and, most importantly, your login info is stored so you don’t have to enter it everytime you want to download something!

We will certainly be adding more features when Jeff returns from his 2-week family trip so please let me know which features are most important to you and what we can improve on!

Posted on September 29, 2015

“Autumn Cliffs” is another Fall themed image that I’ve been working on. This one just finished rendering on Bucephalus this afternoon and, while I’m not entirely satisfied with it, I thought it looked nice enough to share while I consider what where to go with it next. I do know that I would like to tweak the foliage colors a bit in the next version (there’s more red here than I would prefer).

I hope to have my another new Autumn render finished in a day or two so check back soon!

Posted on September 28, 2015

I recently installed an old copy of Vue 8 on my Arion workstation so I could render an ultra-hires version of “Red and Gold” for print. While waiting for two new Autumn renders to finish on Shadowfax and Bucephalus I went looking through my old Vue files for likely candidates for new print renders.

That’s when I came across this Autumn version of “Untouched that I created way back in 2008 but for some reason never got around to rendering full-size. I set Arion to rendering and here’s the scene at 5k.

What do you think? Pickle Jar or Gallery??

I hope to have my two new Autumn renders up in the next couple of days so stay tuned!!

Posted on September 18, 2015

I’ve added a version of “Core World” rendered specially for single-screen systems (ie: most of them). It’s strange that Vue and Lightwave both behave different when I change the aspect ratio of my scene. If I design a multi-screen scene (15360 x 2880) in Vue and then reset the camera to 5120 x 2880, it will keep the horizontal FOV and add open up the top/bottom of the frame. If I do the same in Lightwave however it will keep the vertical FOV and crop the horizontal. It makes things a little tricky when creating multiscreens out of single-screen scenes and vice versa.

Posted on September 15, 2015

“Core World” is new in the Members Gallery this evening. With this piece I am imagining what the sky might look like on a world near the galactic center, without all the interstellar dust that darkens our own view of the galaxy.

I rendered the background using Lightwave and the foreground is Vue. Like most of my post-Shadowfax projects, this one was conceived and rendered first as a multiscreen. The single-screen version is a crop of the triple-wide frame, but I will probably render a dedicated single-screen version soon.

My first version (with the golden sky) took nearly 180 hours to render on Bucephalus while the gallery version (with a sky which brings out more the colors in my stars) took only 48 hours on the same machine. The difference? I increased the “world diameter” (moving the horizon further away) and used a flat plane rather than a displaced surface for the water.

Which do you prefer?

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