Red Sky at Night (2024)

Posted on May 18, 2024

I often get requests to “remaster” certain works from my “classic” collection.     This year I’ve been trying to address some of those requests (while still learning a new 3D software package).   Recently in my Discord a member asked that I revisit “Red Sky at Night” from 1998 and I recalled that many folks have requested the same over the years.    I thought it would be interesting to recreate it using VUE using their built in displaced ocean feature but, sadly, couldn’t get the effect I wanted.   

I then tried a terrain (like I did in the original) and it was nice but still not where I wanted to be.   Lastly I used Blender to create an ocean mesh and that gave me the look you see here.    I’ve also reddened the sky quite a bit more than the original to better fit the title. 

I hope you enjoy it.   Might share those other versions in the Pickle Jar later.   Keep the requests coming!!

Flagella

Posted on May 13, 2024

More learning with Cinema4D’s particle system.   Attempting to use a particle emitter, turbulence modifier and the tracer system to create interesting organic structures.   This piece follows along with some of the principles I learned creating “Empiresis“.      I did end up spending a few extra days rendering different color variations after I found the configuration I liked. I’ll add a few of those to the Pickle Jar in the days ahead.

Saguaro Pass (Moonlight)

Posted on May 5, 2024

As promised here’s a night version of  “Saguaro Pass“.      I’ve also added a night version of the “bird’s eye” view, which I created first.      With the day version I used the same sun angle and lighting for both versions, but here I discovered I had to change things up for the ground version to create something interesting.   I hope you enjoy it!

Saguaro Pass (Looking Up)

Posted on May 3, 2024

When I created “Saguaro Pass”  I added a ton of ground level flora to show a springtime desert in bloom.   When I rendered the hi-res version, however, it seemed that lot of this color was lost.    Before sharing the nighttime version I thought it would be fun to render a view from closer to the ground, looking up, to show all of those details.   Which version do you like best??

Saguaro Pass

Posted on May 1, 2024

A little exploration of the brand new, early access version of Gaea2 here.   Gaea, as some of you may know, is my favorite landscape modeling software and I’ve been using version 1 for years.   Version 2, announced earlier this year, has me very excited and the early access was just released.   While Rochallor was busy rendering my C4D particle experiments I decided to test drive some of the new Gaea2 features and ended up with this desert scene which I then rendered using VUE.   There are still quite a few bugs in Gaea2 but it’s looking very promising!