Cauldron (Moon)

Posted on March 19, 2023

I took a bit of time off this past week as my oldest son Ian is home from college for Spring Break. Haven’t been entirely idle however! As promised last time, here’s a look at “Cauldron” from a nearby world.   I played around with a few different concepts before I settled on something I liked, one of which might make it into the Pickle Jar at some point.   

I hope you enjoy it!

Cauldron

Posted on March 10, 2023

I’ve always been fascinated with nebulae and star-forming regions of space and over the years I’ve tried many different methods to recreate them in 3D (going back to “Cradle” in 1999).   Lately I’ve been working with Cinema4D and have been learning to use its wonderful “Pyro” fluid simulator along with the Octane GPU renderer.    It seemed like creating a nebula would be a good first project and here’s what I managed to come up with.   I hope you enjoy it!

As usual, be on the lookout for a “from the ground” render using these stardust clouds as a sky object 🙂

Arcus

Posted on February 28, 2023

As some of you know I’ve been learning a new 3D program recently called Cinema4D.   The program allows you a few different ways to render your creations and I’ve explored a couple of them so far.   I used the built in CPU renderer for “Lacuna” and “Trypophilia” and I used the “Redshift” GPU renderer for “Class M“.   For this abstract piece I used a popular 3D party GPU renderer called “Octane” and I was very pleased to find out that it rendered the scene about 10x faster than when I tried using the CPU.   

There’s definitely a lot of relearning I need to go through to use these GPU rendering engines but I think the results will be worth it.   I hope you enjoy this first experiment!!  

Pacific (Dawn)

Posted on February 24, 2023

After creating “Pacific” I knew I wanted to attempt a night version for those folks who prefer darker wallpapers.   The challenge (as always) was to add some light to the scene.   I tried quite a few different approaches and the whole thing took quite a bit longer than I intended, but I like how this final version turned out.   I hope you enjoy it!

Pacific

Posted on February 15, 2023

February is a pretty brutal time of year where I live so I like to escape to someplace warm and tropical with my artwork.    Here I wanted to explore Gaea’s “Island” node and see if I could create an inviting, realistic looking beach scene.    I left out the planets in the sky this time but maybe in the night version 🙂

I hope you enjoy it if you are looking to escape but are stuck in front of a computer.