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!