Digital Blasphemy | 3D Wallpaper

Posted on March 31, 2022

Shoreline

Before digging back into learning Houdini I wanted to create something peaceful and minimal using VUE. As much as I like to push the envelope to try new stuff, quiet beach scenes like this are comfort food to me.😃
I hope you enjoy them too!

I’d also like to mention that the a la carte system is back so non-Members can now purchase individual wallpapers. My new non-watermarked files are available and folks can now use a shopping cart to purchase multiple wallpapers at once.

Posted on March 27, 2022

Fluorescence[11]

After I posted the UKR version of “Fluorescence” a few weeks ago some folks noticed that the new version looked a bit “cleaner” than the original. It’s true that I had to clean some things up to render that a new version of that file.

Fluorescence[6] is probably my most famous render, but I’ve never been able to create proper versions for modern monitors because I created it using an old version of Lightwave (version 6) and the newer versions render things a bit differently.

This is my basically my attempt to create a more “modern” version of an old wallpaper for 4k monitors and above. I used Lightwave 11 this time so I’ve reflected that in the title. Will I render a new version using my new tools someday? Of course 😄

On a personal note I just returned from some much needed family time away from the workstation and I am looking forward to getting back to my crystals.

Posted on March 18, 2022

Crystalline (Night)

As soon as I posted “Crystalline” folks were asking if I could do a night version. I’m usually all too happy to try one, but this scene presented a few challenges. The main one being that the lighting comes from an “environment map” which is basically a spherical 360 degree photo with extra exposure data encoded.

So to darken this scene I edited that background image to make it look more like night. It’s trickery though (like how they did those old movies…shooting during the day and darkening the film). I’m still learning how to set up lighting in Houdini so I hope it looks ok.

Let me know what you think!

Posted on March 16, 2022

Crystalline

Back to learning how to use Houdini. I’ve always been fascinated with crystals and how they interact with the light. The goal here was to learn how to use the Houdini’s Karma renderer along with subsurface scattering and transparency.

Full disclosure: I followed this tutorial to learn how to model the crystals themselves but I think I’ve added enough of my own creativity to share the render in my gallery. LMK what you think 🙂