Posted on December 15, 2018

Ornament (2018)

I vividly remember back in 2001 showing one of Jessica’s friends my (then) recent “Ornament” render. She told me it looked nice but the ornament itself was “kinda plain”.

For this update I used Plant Factory for the boughs AND to create the ornament itself. I used Lightwave to create a displacement texture for the ornament and that turned out to be the most time consuming part. I went through a LOT of different variations before I found one (a Flame Fractal) that I liked. Anyway I hope it looks more interesting now.

It’s still kinda plain but a good wallpaper doesn’t need to be too flashy…

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Posted on December 3, 2018

O Night Divine

Hopefully it isn’t too early to post a Christmas wallpaper. This piece grew out of my attempts to create aurora using Plant Factory. That remains a work-in-progress but you can judge my early results here. The tree was modeled using Plant Factory and I used displacement to (hopefully) make the “snow spheres” look more natural.

Should I do more Christmas wallpapers or more “non-Holiday” winter scenes?

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Root Access

This scene was an exercise using Plant Factory to model hard surface, non-plant, objects. Normally I would have modeled and rendered a scene like this using Lightwave, but Plant Factory objects work so well in Vue that I may go this route from time to time.

I hope you enjoy it! I put this one together on Bucephalus while my new Christmas project finished rendering on Shadowfax. It should be ready very soon!!

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Posted on November 13, 2018

Distant Shores

I’ve created a lot of very different plants using Plant Factory and I’ve used it to create some interesting “non-plant” objects (tornadoes, aurora, and snow for example). This time I wanted to see if I could use Plant Factory to model a spiral galaxy.

The galaxy object was rendered in Vue (I also experimented using Lightwave) and then that was used as a background for the scene you see here. I hope you enjoy it!

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Posted on November 1, 2018

Three Moon Bay (Day)

“Three Moon Bay” naturally lent itself to a sunny daytime view. I tried something a bit different with the water in Vue with this one. Usually I set the water to absorb sunlight, resulting a darker and more reflective ocean. This time I set it to scatter the light so the water is a bit brighter.

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Posted on October 19, 2018

Harvest Moon (Happy Halloween!)

Hard to believe that I’ve made at least one Halloween render every year since 1998. Sure, some of the early ones look pretty rough (as my boys have been reminding my lately) but I think looking at the whole collection shows a pretty good cross-section of my growth as an artist over the years.

If you look at my top Halloween images you will notice that the top rated renders can be used as wallpapers any time of the year. I’ve tried to go that route with “Harvest Moon”, my (first) Halloween(ish) offering of 2018. I hope you enjoy it.

Non-watermarked lossless 8K version available to Lifetime Supporters and Plus Level Members (and above). Dual and triple-screen versions are in the works!

I may have one more Halloween render before the the trick-or-treaters come knocking. Stay tuned!