Posted on August 28, 2009

• “Afterglow” was the first wallpaper to use my new watermark. This one is a ton easier to apply for me. I developed a number Photoshop Actions to so I can resize/crop and watermark around 25 different files in under 1 minute where it used to take me about 30 minutes.

  This will make it a lot easier for me to post files and will probably lead to me posting more files that might not have because of the busy work involved with creating the different sizes (like the Afterglow Pickle Jar version that I uploaded last evening). I’m a little ashamed that I didn’t think of this earlier!

  The whole reason for doing this was that the watermark wouldn’t be hidden by the Windows 7 taskbar. In the process though I’ve added a few new text effects so it does look a little different than the old one.

  I would be interested to hear what my Members thought of it before I moved forward. Does it sit over your taskbar (windows users) or does it look strange on other OSs? If I need to make changes I would like to do it now rather than post more images. Please leave the screen resolution you are running if there are problems. Thanks!!

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Posted on August 26, 2009

• My render finished this afternoon (it took around 52 hours if you are counting), but a doctor’s appointment, Ian’s Tae Kwan Do, and putting the kids to bed had to come first. I’ve called this one “Afterglow”, though it doesn’t really bear much resemblance to the original.

  As long as I have been using landscape programs, I have never been able to work with a real (round) planet. I’ve always built my scenes on infinite plains. This only really comes into play if you move the camera really high or move the sun below the horizon. It is basically impossible for the sun to cast light on clouds if it is below the horizon of an infinite plane. Being able to render my scene on a giant sphere makes possible (without cheats) scenes like “Afterglow” where the clouds are lit by a sun that has set. The only light in the scene comes from the clouds and the sky (so it may seem a little dark to some of you).

  It is a scene that I have always wanted to do (this probably won’t be the last you see either) and I’m glad it is now possible. Unfortunately, Vue d’Esprit crashed every for minutes while making this. The planetary render mode was designed to render these spheres from high altitude (think pictures of planets rather than the surface of them) so perhaps that it why it got unstable.

  Anyway, sorry for the long explanation. I hope it was worth the wait!

• If you didn’t catch my Twitter/Facebook updates the past couple of days, I was in San Antonio yesterday with Jessie. The nice folks at Rackspace flew us down to tour their offices and meet the crew. I don’t take many business trips so this was a special treat for me, even though I had to give a little speech (shudder). Anyway, they were wonderful to us and I left with the feeling that my site was in good hands. We even got to see the Alamo(and will never forget it).
• Just a quick note that some new pricing will be rolled out in the next few weeks. I’m not going to say much else beyond the fact that if you like the current price I offer for Lifetime Memberships I would recommend you not wait too much longer.
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Posted on August 24, 2009

• I had hoped to have my render all ready this morning (as I have to go out of town for a couple of days) but a nasty Vue d’Esprit bug reared up and ate it. Completely unusable. I’ve started the render over and will be as careful as can be to have it up when I return Wednesday morning.

  Unfortunately it seems crashes and lost renders are part of the game when you try to push the envelope with 3D software (especially with Vue d’Esprit). I think the project will be worth the wait and I hope you will agree. Unless my computer is struck by lightning the render will be up on Wednesday.

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Posted on August 18, 2009

• Believe it or not I have saved every news post since October 1999. That’s almost 10 years of Digital Blasphemy!

  If you are interested you can now browse the news archive by year. Just mouse over the new “news archive” link on the left hand side and pick a starting point. It runs backwards because I always post the newest news at the top.

  Highlights include: “Ryan has major surgery” (a nadir really), “Jason is born“,”We move to Illinois“, “Ian is born“, “I’m going to be a Dad!“, “Ryan and Jessie get married!“, and last but not least “First house!“.

  There’s a lot of posts and I certainly don’t expect everyone to read it all. Just want you guys to know that it was there.

  The new render should be up tomorrow (fingers crossed).

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Posted on August 16, 2009

• I have added a “New Images Only” Twitter Feed this morning. If you are only interested in when new graphics are posted to the gallery and don’t want to hear anything else from me, you can follow at http://twitter.com/dbnewimages or subscribe to this feed (“http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/66129689.rss“) using your RSS reader of choice.

  This page (along with the “main” DB Twitter account and Facebook Page) will have posts that are a little more in depth, more frequent, and not always related to my graphics.

  All additions to the gallery will be documented as they have been before, but the new feed will be for those who are only interested in the gallery updates and not posts I make in between.

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