Posted on January 31, 2003

• I just wanted to let you all know that I started working on a new wallpaper a few days ago. I’m putting the finishing touches on it right now and I hope to have it up before Monday. I won’t be working on it tomorrow however, as I will be spending the day with Jessie celebrating her birthday. We are going to have a picnic on the beach, go shopping for maternity clothes and then end up at Buca di Beppo for a big Italian dinner.

  I know Jessie loves hearing from you guys, so if anyone wants to send a “Happy Birthday Email” you can send it to this address. Thanks!

Posted on January 27, 2003

• I’ve posted a dual-screen version of “Sangre” in the 2X gallery. I had meant to have this one ready over the weekend, but I ran into some technical difficulties regarding Lightwave’s native Depth-of-Field rendering. It just looked bad at the higher resolution and nothing I tried helped.

  Finally, I broke down and purchased Evasion3D’s Xdof plugin on Saturday. I had to wait until today for the licensing to go through so I could actually use it. I’m amazed. The blurring is smooth as silk and the render times are only a fraction of what they were before. I’ve posted a “cleaned-up” version of the single-screen render as well, though the improvement is not as dramatic. I’ve set up a side-by-side comparison so you can see the improvements for yourself.

  I’m going to be taking a few days to do some research and take care of a few other things that I’ve been meaning to do. I’ll post here when I’ve started working on a new wallpaper.

• Just so you all know: Yes, the folks at Sapphire purchased a legitimate license to use my work on their Radeon boxes. They are not ripping me off. I appreciate everyone’s concern however, and I hope you will continue to contact me if you see my work “out there”.

Posted on January 23, 2003

• Added “Sangre” to the gallery this evening. I’ve always been fascinated with the small places inside our bodies (probably from too many viewings of “Fantastic Voyage” and “Innerspace“) and this image continues my exploration of that theme. It may or may not be appropriate desktop material and I apologize if it doesn’t work for you.

Posted on January 20, 2003

• As mentioned last time, I spent the weekend trying different things with “Cathedral”. In the end, I prefer the version I posted on Friday. I’m going to leave it as is and move on to something new.

  Some of you have mentioned that the edges of “Cathedral” are too dark. This was intentional on my part. I wanted there to be a central area of brightness in the middle of the screen, framed all around by shadow (plus it goes nicely with my new black framed monitor).

  Some of you also wrote in with ideas for things I should add to the image. After much consideration I decided that this image should be kept simple and uncluttered. Thanks everyone for the feedback!

Posted on January 17, 2003

• Added “Cathedral” to the gallery today. I did this one to test how my new workstation handles hi-precision, “multi-bounce”, radiosity calculations. Rendering still takes a quite a long time. I’m going to keep testing over the weekend so I might post a different version if I see significant improvements.