Posted on April 17, 2008

• Time to pop in an give you all an update on what I’m working on now. I’m currently putting together a new animated wallpaper and trying to get it to render efficiently. It’s a whole new set of challenges different than rendering stills.

  I have scenes which can take up to 48 hours (or more) to render a single frame, so I am limited to quick rendering scenes when I want to do animations. The animation I’m working on now has 720 frames so getting them to render in minutes rather than hours is very important. I’m using Fprime (the essential Lightwave renderer) so frames take a lot less time to render than normally. The downside is that I have to render them on my main machine (since Fprime doesn’t support network rendering).

  During the render I plan on putting together my secondary box and trying to get some of my other programs to work on it so I can hopefully do some work while rendering other projects.

  That’s what I have on tap now. Hopefully the new “Dreamscene” will be ready sometime next week. I hopefully it’s worth the wait!

Posted on April 9, 2008

• I’ve added dual and triple screen versions of “Starbirth” to the gallery this morning. I basically had three choices as to how I could expand this one. I could had nothing but stars on the sides, I could have glowing clouds, or I could have “dark matter”. I chose the third option because I think it’s more interesting than just stars and because I thought the focal point should be the star being born in the “center”. Hope you like it!

• On a more melancholy note, my Grandmother passed away Saturday morning after a long illness. We’d been expecting it for some time now but it’s still something of a shock when it finally happens. Anyway, I mention it now because her Obit was published today and if you are interested in learning a little more about her you can read it here.

  I’ll always remember her as a no-nonsense farmer’s wife and a wonderful cook of unhealthy meals.

Posted on April 6, 2008

• Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted here. Jessie and I just returned late Friday from 5 wonderful days (without kids) on the Mexican Rivera. This was the first time since Ian was born in 2003 that we’ve been able to get away together and it couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve really had a pretty rotten winter (still recovering from my surgery in November believe it or not) and I really needed a recharge.

  We had a great time in Mexico. We visited the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza (wow!) and tried scuba diving (WOW!!). I’ll try to post a picture or two later on. We ended up missing the kids greatly and are glad to be back home now.

  I had started a project before we left and I’ve spent the weekend putting the finishing touches on it. It’s called “Starbirth (2008)” and is now up for your review. This is one that probably would have been a lot simpler to make if I was using 2D techniques, but was very complicated using 3D. Still, it was a nice test of my newly upgraded machine (see post from 3/19). It took around 2 hours to render at 2560 x 1600.

  I hope you enjoy it. Look for multi-screen versions in the days ahead.

Posted on March 23, 2008

• Late Update: I’ve added a Pickle Jar version without the foreground figure. Personally I don’t think you get the same sense of scale without the person, but I’m all for providing options. Which do you prefer?

• Added “Moonshadow” to the gallery this morning. Sometimes working with clouds in Vue d’Esprit is easy and sometimes it can be very frustrating. I’ve been tweaking these for the past few days trying to get just the right look. At least the render times weren’t too bad (see my post below about hardware upgrades).

  Hope you like it!

• Since I asked people to post pictures of their computer setups on the DB Facebook page, it only seemed fair that I post my own. If you are interested in where I work you can check out a photo here.

Posted on March 19, 2008

• The DB on Facebook page has been a real eye opener. All these years I’ve been looking at emails and comments from people, a lot of text, and now I can see human faces. While I know there are real people behind all of these emails I get, this makes it all seem more personal and real. Very cool.

  I had an idea that might make my Facebook page a little more interesting. I’m sure a lot of you out there have some wicked multi-monitor setups running my wallpapers. For a long time I’ve wanted to have a place where people could share photos of their workstations and it looks like the Facebook “Fan Photos” sections might fit the bill.

  I personally run only one monitor but I would love to see some of the multi-monitor (and cool single monitor) setups out there. If you would like to share your desktop with the world please feel free to post a photo of it in the “Fan Photos” section of the Facebook page. Thanks!

• Based on my experience rendering “Promise of Spring” (see post from 2/12) I’ve decided that I need to upgrade my hardware. Here’s my plan: I’ve purchased two Xeon 5365 (quad-core 3 GHZ) processors and 16 GB of RAM. These will go into my current machine, upgrading it from from 4 cores to 8 and 8 GB of RAM to 16. My dual-core processors and RAM will go into a new box that I am building from scratch on which I hope to use to render projects while I work on new stuff on my main machine.

  Back to work on my new wallpaper now…