Posted on July 27, 2007

• I’ve created an “Animations” page with Quicktime previews of the “Singularity” and “Fluorescence” animations I posted this week. Hopefully having the smaller previews available will help those who were unable to view the hi-res files (and keep folks from downloading a 40 MB without knowing its contents).

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Posted on July 26, 2007

• I’ve added another animated wallpaper this afternoon. This one is based on my “Fluorescence[6]” image. Specifically it is inspired by all the folks who written me over the past five or so years asking if the little Flash animation on the Members Login page could be used as a wallpaper.

  As with the Singularity image, this one is available as a MPG file. I would rather not upload a because I want the video to play across a number of different platforms, not just Windows.

  You can download the video here. It is a 45 MB file. These are big files!

  Speaking of which I will most likely have to order more bandwidth from Rackspace if I am going to continue to host these files. I’ve purchased 500 GB per month but all the downloads of my Singularity video yesterday alone added up to around 30 GB. I can’t imagine what the bandwidth bill would be if I hosted, say, 10 of these animations.

  Anyway, I hope you like the new video!

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Posted on July 25, 2007

• I’ve just uploaded a 1920 x 1080 (1080p) looping animated version of “Singularity” which should be suitable for use as “animated wallpaper” on systems which support that option. The file is 43 MB and you can click here to download it (right-click the link and select “Save As”).

  This is my first attempt at an animated wallpaper. I’ve tested the animation on my “Vista Ultimate” box (my old workstation) it seems to work. If you do try it out I would love to hear your feedback. If it works well I’ll be happy to do some more (where possible).

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Posted on July 23, 2007

• The feedback for “Circumpolar” has been almost all positive. After the frustration that came with rendering it, I’m overjoyed that it has been so well received.

  I’ve added dual and triple-screen versions this morning.

Posted on July 21, 2007

• Added “Circumpolar” to the gallery this morning. I spent far too much time working on this one (as Jessie has been fond of reminding me these past few days). The reason is threefold. two of the my fault. I was learning a new modeling program (Zbrush) and I was learning to use Vue’s subsurface scattering. My knowledge of both is still pretty rough at this point, and I have much to learn, but I think the knowledge will pay big dividends down the road.

  The last problem was beyond my control. It seemed whenever I tried to do my final render it would always come out blocky and smeary looking as if I was using the lowest quality settings. So I would jack up the render settings and try again, causing the next render to take even longer but with the same results. I went through this for about 5 days when I finally found a newly released patch for Vue fixing, you guessed it, blocky renders when using global illumination. Long story short, my program had a bug which caused me to waste 5 days.

  I applied the patch last night and the render finished this morning. I could probably keep fiddling with this image for the rest of my life, but I think it’s time to move on to other projects. Thanks for your patience!

• If you haven’t been to the gallery for the past week or so (and you own an iPhone or similar device) please check out the posts directly below. Also, I’d like to mention that I’ve placed a permanent link for adding “Member Testimonials” (it had fallen down the page and out of view recently). Thanks!