Posted on April 21, 2008

• I did some calculations after I made my last post and discovered that my animation render wouldn’t be finished for at least another week. If I let the render go and waited until it was done to start working on a new “static” wallpaper, it could be in the two week range before I updated my gallery.

  I decided to pause the animation render and spend this weekend working on something new. My latest project, “Island Time”, is now up on the New Images page for your review. The title refers to the somewhat hazy definition of time that comes from dwelling in paradise. I hope you enjoy it.

  I plan on restarting new Dreamscene render as soon as I figure out how to widen “Island Time” to span multiple monitors.

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Posted on April 17, 2008

• Time to pop in an give you all an update on what I’m working on now. I’m currently putting together a new animated wallpaper and trying to get it to render efficiently. It’s a whole new set of challenges different than rendering stills.

  I have scenes which can take up to 48 hours (or more) to render a single frame, so I am limited to quick rendering scenes when I want to do animations. The animation I’m working on now has 720 frames so getting them to render in minutes rather than hours is very important. I’m using Fprime (the essential Lightwave renderer) so frames take a lot less time to render than normally. The downside is that I have to render them on my main machine (since Fprime doesn’t support network rendering).

  During the render I plan on putting together my secondary box and trying to get some of my other programs to work on it so I can hopefully do some work while rendering other projects.

  That’s what I have on tap now. Hopefully the new “Dreamscene” will be ready sometime next week. I hopefully it’s worth the wait!

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Posted on April 9, 2008

• I’ve added dual and triple screen versions of “Starbirth” to the gallery this morning. I basically had three choices as to how I could expand this one. I could had nothing but stars on the sides, I could have glowing clouds, or I could have “dark matter”. I chose the third option because I think it’s more interesting than just stars and because I thought the focal point should be the star being born in the “center”. Hope you like it!

• On a more melancholy note, my Grandmother passed away Saturday morning after a long illness. We’d been expecting it for some time now but it’s still something of a shock when it finally happens. Anyway, I mention it now because her Obit was published today and if you are interested in learning a little more about her you can read it here.

  I’ll always remember her as a no-nonsense farmer’s wife and a wonderful cook of unhealthy meals.

Posted on April 6, 2008

• Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted here. Jessie and I just returned late Friday from 5 wonderful days (without kids) on the Mexican Rivera. This was the first time since Ian was born in 2003 that we’ve been able to get away together and it couldn’t have come at a better time. I’ve really had a pretty rotten winter (still recovering from my surgery in November believe it or not) and I really needed a recharge.

  We had a great time in Mexico. We visited the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza (wow!) and tried scuba diving (WOW!!). I’ll try to post a picture or two later on. We ended up missing the kids greatly and are glad to be back home now.

  I had started a project before we left and I’ve spent the weekend putting the finishing touches on it. It’s called “Starbirth (2008)” and is now up for your review. This is one that probably would have been a lot simpler to make if I was using 2D techniques, but was very complicated using 3D. Still, it was a nice test of my newly upgraded machine (see post from 3/19). It took around 2 hours to render at 2560 x 1600.

  I hope you enjoy it. Look for multi-screen versions in the days ahead.

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Posted on March 23, 2008

• Late Update: I’ve added a Pickle Jar version without the foreground figure. Personally I don’t think you get the same sense of scale without the person, but I’m all for providing options. Which do you prefer?

• Added “Moonshadow” to the gallery this morning. Sometimes working with clouds in Vue d’Esprit is easy and sometimes it can be very frustrating. I’ve been tweaking these for the past few days trying to get just the right look. At least the render times weren’t too bad (see my post below about hardware upgrades).

  Hope you like it!

• Since I asked people to post pictures of their computer setups on the DB Facebook page, it only seemed fair that I post my own. If you are interested in where I work you can check out a photo here.

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