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.