Posted on June 8, 2008

• I’ve added an updated version of “Untouched” to the gallery this morning. The original will remain available in the Pickle Jar. I’ve strengthened the volumetric light in this one and hopefully this will counter some of the grain from the original.

  There really isn’t much else than can be done about the grain I’m afraid, I think it’s just a result of all the millions of leaves in the background.

  I made a few other additions as well which I will leave to you to discover. I hope you like it.

  I’ll work to have a multi-screen version up ASAP.

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Posted on June 4, 2008

• I added “Untouched” to the gallery this afternoon. Looking at it now I can see a few things that I might (or might not) yet tweak, but I think it looks nice enough as is to post. This once takes around 36 hours to render and I would rather post it and continue tweaking than make you all wait.

  We’ve had a great deal of rain around here this spring and this piece is dedicated to the wonderful green that I see everywhere after a particularly long and depressing winter.

  I hope you enjoy it!

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Posted on June 3, 2008

• I had a wallpaper ready to post this morning but I decided that it needed a few adjustments and one more render before I would be happy with it. I hope to have it ready by tomorrow or Thursday at the latest.

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Posted on May 29, 2008

• I was waiting for some test renders to finish this morning when I surfed over to Inga Nielson’s web gallery. If you aren’t familiar with her work, she has some samples in my User Gallery and was recently featured on NASA’s popular Astronomy Picture of the Day site. Anyway, I clicked through to her Zazzle collection and noticed that she had some of her work available as mousepads. This got me thinking that perhaps it was time I offered the same.

  I used to offer mousepads through Cafepress, but to be honest I wasn’t that satified with their quality and I haven’t added any new ones in years. Last year I teamed with a company to offer “hi-tech gaming surfaces” but they stopped paying me royalities and I’m in the middle of figuring out how to work that out.

  Zazzle has always treated me well and I think they do fabulous printing work. I went ahead and added around 12 of my most popular designs as mousepads this morning. If your favorite isn’t there and you are interested in purchasing a mousepad, please feel free to comment below or on my Zazzle comment wall.

  Work on my latest image has been a little slow this week. It’s Ian’s last week of preschool (he starts kindergarten in the fall) so there’s been a lot of activities that I’ve had to attend. Still, I’ve made some progress and I hope to have something posted soon.

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Posted on May 25, 2008

• I’ve posted a new animated wallpaper this morning on the Animations page. This is the one I’ve been rendering for the past month or so and have mentioned from time to time. The animation is based on my “Dispersion” wallpaper which I posted last year.

  In the animated version I have the colors cycle slowly through the spectrum such that it appears the individual colors are moving from bottle to bottle. It’s a pretty simple animation really, but each frame (out of 720 total) took around 30 minutes to render. I’ve tried to minimize noise as much as possible but some still remains. I could refine the frames for another two weeks but I don’t think the improvement would be worth the time. Anyway, I hope you like it.

  A question for you all. For future animated wallpapers would you rather see my stills animated (which will cause the rendering to take a very long time) or would you rather see animations designed from scratch? If I designed animated wallpapers from scratch the rendering won’t take as long, but I don’t think a still frame from the animation would hold up next to the stills that are in my gallery now.

  Basically, would you rather see ultra-high quality animations (but only a few) or more simpler animations? Feel free to post in the thread I’ve set up below.

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