Posted on May 2, 2008

• I had hoped to have my newest “Dreamscene” animation ready to post this afternoon, but after rendering all of my stills into a movie it looks like it needs still more work. My Fprime software allows you to “refine” your renders to higher quality so I don’t have to go back and start from scratch. I can just refine them further, but it’s still a lengthy process.

  The problem is noise, which in a static image isn’t really noticable but when the animation is running produces irritating shimmering effects in areas of the image which should be still. I’d hoped that rendering at a “medium” quality setting would result in a quick render, but the noise is unacceptable to me.

  I will probably shelve this for the time being and start working on another wallpaper this weekend. I can’t say when it will be ready because I haven’t started it yet, but hopefully sometime next week. Sorry for the delay though. Creating animated wallpaper is new to me and I am still learning how to do it well. I’d rather wait and post something excellent than post something substandard.

  I also wanted to draw your attention to the links on the left hand side of the page. I’ve replaced the long list of galleries with expandable menus. Just move your mouse over the “year” links and the “collections” link to see further options. Hopefully this will make navigating the gallery a little easier, or at least clean up the page a little.

Posted on April 24, 2008

• Added dual and triple screen versions of “Island Time” to the gallery this morning. I’m glad most of you seemed to like it!

  I’ve gotten a lot of requests in the past few months for triple widescreen images and I just wanted you all to know that I am going to start working on them. Look for 7680 x 1600 images to be added in the months ahead to fit multiple 30 inchers. I just need to go back and re-render some of the older images and then integrate them into the gallery.

Posted on April 21, 2008

• I did some calculations after I made my last post and discovered that my animation render wouldn’t be finished for at least another week. If I let the render go and waited until it was done to start working on a new “static” wallpaper, it could be in the two week range before I updated my gallery.

  I decided to pause the animation render and spend this weekend working on something new. My latest project, “Island Time”, is now up on the New Images page for your review. The title refers to the somewhat hazy definition of time that comes from dwelling in paradise. I hope you enjoy it.

  I plan on restarting new Dreamscene render as soon as I figure out how to widen “Island Time” to span multiple monitors.

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.