Posted on December 16, 2006

• Late Update: Many of you have commented that the snow in the new “Snowy Creek Christmas” doesn’t look quite right. Easily fixed. A revised version is now up on the new images page. The original will remain in the Pickle Jar.

• Sorry it’s been so long since I have posted here. After posting “Snowy Creek” I recieved a number of suggestions that the image would work well as a Christmas image. I thought it would be an interesting challenge. It was quite a bit more difficult than I had envisioned at the outset. The next paragraph is technical in nature (skip if you aren’t interested)…

  Since the trees were placed using Vue’s “Ecosystem” method, I couldn’t alter their geometry and ensure the same placement as in the original image. If I wanted to add lights to the trees I would have to do it using the geometry already in place. I finally figured out a way to make it work using Vue’s “Mixed Materials”, but it took many days to tweak the luminosity, glow and atmosphere to where I was happy with the results (renders took between 8-12 hours each). Of course, the longer I spent on it the more I wanted the image to look perfect (sort of a vicious circle). To be honest, I’m still not 100% satisfied (the hi-res version looks much nicer than the thumbnail). But I think it is time to move on.

  To sum up, what I thought would be a simple conversion took much longer than intended. The Christmas version of “Snowy Creek” is now up on the new images page. I will have multi-monitors of both the day and night versions up shortly. Thanks for being patient!

Posted on December 1, 2006

• I added “Snowy Creek” to the gallery this evening. A snow scene sounded like a good idea a few days ago, when the temperatures were in the 60s here in Illinois. Now that a monster winter storm has rolled though the area (knocking my power out for most of last night and today) I am feeling a little less romantic about snow and ice. Still, Ian seemed to enjoy playing in it so it wasn’t all bad. Enjoy!

Posted on November 25, 2006

• I’ve added dual and triple screen versions of both “Morning Mist” and “Metropolis”. I had to tighten up the framing for Metropolis because widening the frame caused too much perspective distortion at the edges (which is not good for vertical structures). Some of the distortion is still visibile but it is not as bad as it could have been.

Posted on November 20, 2006

• I was looking at my Cafepress store this morning and I noticed that they are having a sale on calendars. Both the oversize and regular calendars are discounted ($4 off the regular calendar, $4.80 off the oversize). Just F.Y.I.

Posted on November 19, 2006

• My experiments with the new Vue 6 beta continue. The software is somewhat more stable now since they’ve updated it, and I’ve manage to dig a little deeper into the features. This past week I wanted to see how it would handle a lot of imported Lightwave objects. I thought now would be a good time to update “Metropolis“, one of my favorites from 1999. The new version is now up for your review. I hope you like it!

  Regarding the noise in “Morning Mist”. There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that I think I can render a version without the noise. The bad news is that I think it would take at least a week for the render to complete. I’m going to investigate Vue’s network rendering features (which were broken until the aforementioned software update) and see if I can maybe render it faster.

  My last bit of news is for you gamers out there. I’ve partnered with a company called “Func Custom Gear” to produce some high quality gaming mousepads (or “mousing surfaces” as I believe they are called). They have a rather nifty utility which will allow you to choose the type of surface you want and then choose one of my images to print on it. You can also upload your own logo to lay over the top of my work or add your own custom text. PC Gamer just gave them an “Editors Choice” award in the current issue. Have a look here if you are interested.