Glenwood

Posted on January 8, 2024

Here’s an update to an old favorite from 2000.   The original was created and rendered using a program called “World Builder”, which is now defunct. It’s been 24 years (!) and I wanted to see if I could improve the quality of the plant life and recreate the volumetric lighting using VUE.    The hardest part was matching the godrays from the original.  VUE’s engine just works differently.   

I think I came pretty close however and I hope you enjoy it! 

High Country (Winter/Night)

Posted on January 2, 2024

Happy New Year!!    Hard to believe that 2024 will mark my 25th year since I decided to quit my day-job and make DB my fulltime passion. It’s my 27th year since I first posted my renders online! Huge thanks to everyone who has subscribed or otherwise supported me and my family throughout the years. I could not have done this without you!!

As promised, here’s the night version of “High Country (Winter)“.    As always with a night scene, the challenge is to darken the scene without it being too dark.   After quite a bit of experimentation I think I’ve settled on the right mix of moonlight and shadow here.   I’m still working on a spring version but finding it difficult to populate the scene with enough plants for some reason.   Will continue the fight though 🙂

High Country (Winter)

Posted on December 28, 2023

For my last project of 2023 I wanted to try something a little different with my landscape rendering.   Whereas I usually set my “camera” focal length to capture a wide angle here I wanted to set it to a narrow field of view.   I feel it yields an interesting effect with reduced depth-of-field.   At the very least it insures that my trees don’t exhibit barrel distortion when I render the scene for multiple monitors.

I do have a night version of this scene in the works and might attempt to revisit it in the springtime.

I hope you have enjoyed my work this year!! If you feel like I’ve done an especially good job in 2023 please feel free to leave me a year-end bonus in my tipjar 🙏🏽

Park Place (Christmas)

Posted on December 18, 2023

One of my favorite parts of the Christmas season is how we transform our day-to-day spaces into festive wonderlands of light as the days shorten.    I’ve decided to make that my theme for Christmas 2023, decorating two of my scenes with lights.   The first, “A Christmas in Paradise“, takes the holidays to the tropics.   

This piece, a Christmas version of “Park Place (Spring)” is a bit more traditional in nature.   I hope you enjoy them both and have a wonderful holiday season wherever you might be in the world!

Tropic of Aquarius (Night)

Posted on December 8, 2023

I wasn’t planning on doing a night version of “Tropic of Aquarius” but I received many requests for one.   Fair enough!   They are always fun to create and I know lots of people prefer darker wallpapers.   For a night scene like this (where the planet in the background is lit from above) you will have to believe that the foreground sunlight is being eclipsed by another moon in this system 😉

I hope you enjoy it!!