Posted on October 13, 2010

“Highland Spring” is one of my most complicated scenes (it contains hundreds of billions of polygons) so adding realistic clouds for a summer version really knocked the render times through the roof.

I tried to mitigate this with my first attempt by making the clouds fairly opaque (the more you can see through the clouds the longer the render), but the final effect wasn’t quite up to par with the original.

Back to the drawing board and, two weeks of render time later, I’ve posted my final version of “Highland Summer” this morning. I’ve tried to make the clouds more wispy and “fog-like” and I’ve strengthened the shadows from the higher cloud levels. The clouds, I think, are the most realistic I’ve attempted to render (detail crop here).

It feels strange posting a summer picture while the leaves are falling outside my window, but I’m sure my fans down-under will under enjoy a timely seasonal wallpaper for a change. I will try to get the multiscreen version of this going ASAP, but it will probably be a while. More renderers would speed up this process for me…

The first two renders will remain in the Pickle Jar for your perusal.