Posted on June 7, 2000

• 30 minutes after I posted Phaeralon last week I stopped by Flay. That’s where I read about this “organic” modeler called Xfrog. I downloaded the trial version and was instantly hooked. Download it and see for yourself. Be warned though, it generates some seriously hi-poly meshes, and they might be too complex for a program like Bryce. Vue d’Esprit should be able to load them, but I haven’t tried it.

  So I set Phaeralon aside for the moment and rendered some “weird stuff”. Five of these renders are now up for your review. All are similarly themed (I guess) so I’m grouping them together under the name Synapse. Some of the images are more synaptic than others, I guess. Comments?

Posted on June 2, 2000

• Added Phaeralon today to the Day Scenery gallery. This one is basically an experiment to see if Lightwave 6 can handle radiosity (indirect lighting) on a “grand scale”. Looks good to me, what do you think?

Posted on May 30, 2000

• Jove is new today. There are a lot of things to like about living in San Diego, but exciting weather is not one of them. I miss huge thunderstorms rolling across the prairie, with lightning arcing from cloud to cloud. All we get in SD is an occasional fog bank. Very boring. Oh well, I guess that’s why I moved here…

  Anyway, “Jove” uses techniques that I think will come in handy later on. If you are familiar with my work, then you know that I have an affinity for puffy clouds. Bryce could do puffy clouds, but it took something like 24-48 hours to render a screen full of them. Lightwave 5 was big improvement but your control over the cloud texture was limited. Lightwave 6, finally, renders reasonably fast and allows full control. Jove (and it’s derivatives) rendered in less that 4 hours on 2 processors. Not bad.

  Because it rendered so “fast” I was able to render several hi-res cloudscapes to see how they looked. You can check out the rest in the Picklejar and if you have any comments you can send them my way.

Posted on May 24, 2000

• Shallows is new today. Check out the Picklejar and you’ll see that this started as a very different image. I’ve been working on this scene for the past three or four days, but this last version did not materialize until just this morning. What do you think?

Posted on May 17, 2000

• A few new items today…

  I spent yesterday trying to figure out Hypervoxels 3.0, and how it’s different than 2.0. I did a few renders of an abstract nature and I’ve posted them for your review. I chose one to display on the new images page and put the rest in the Picklejar, along with an animated version of the scene. The animation is MPG encoded, and it should run on just about every OS. Let me know if you have problems though (try saving the file to your hard disk rather than “streaming” it).

• I’ve added an animated version of “Morning Light“. Once again, this is in MPG format.
• I’ve added a slightly different version of “Neptune’s Garden” in the Pickejar.
• I’ve added an updated version of “Escort” to the Picklejar.
• I’ve added 1600 x 1200 versions of “Planetfall” and “Sleepwalker“.
• I’ve added a second view of “Pyre” to the Picklejar.