Hooded Peak

Posted on February 12, 2022

I’ve always been something of a cloud nerd, and have long been fascinated by lenticular clouds. They form over mountaintops (and other areas) and often look like huge flying saucers. I am fairly certain I’ve never seen them depicted in a 3D landscape render before now.

I used Houdini here to create the cloud object, Gaea to create the mountain, and the whole scene is rendered in VUE. Multiscreen versions are still rendering.

This is sort of an experimental scene and I will probably do another version or two before I’m satisified. Let me know what you think!

Father Light

Posted on February 7, 2022

Before moving on to a new project I decided to create a daytime version of “Mother Night“. The title is simple symmetry. I hope you enjoy it!!

I also played around with animating the nighttime scene over the past week. It’s always been tempting to animate these scenes but the night version rendered particularly quickly so I was able to do some experimentation. Are you guys even interested in animated wallpaper??

Mother Night

Posted on January 30, 2022

You might recall that I used Houdini’s volumes to create the ice/rock formations in “Subglacial” and “Subterrane” which I then rendered in VUE. For this render I wanted to see if I could use those same volumes to create a nebula to use in the sky of a night scene. Again I used VUE to render the nebula but I think I’m about ready to start experimenting with Houdini’s renderer.

I hope you enjoy it and leave a comment to let me know your thoughts.

I also want to remind my Members who haven’t yet migrated their DB 1.0 accounts to DB 2.0 that you can log in and do so here. FYI! The iOS and Android apps still use the old DB 1.0 logins. I will post here when the apps have been updated to use the new logins. On the plus side, DB 2.0 looks a LOT better on mobile…

DB 2.0

Posted on January 18, 2022

Cris and I have been hard at work getting DB 2.0 ready and I think it’s time to let folks use the new site. If you are a Member and you haven’t yet migrated your account data over to the DB 2.0 please log in to the old account page here and click the link to do so.

I plan on keeping DB 1.0 running for a little while longer but I’m not going to add any more Members here. The mobile apps will keep functioning as well as Display Fusion and MMW Integration for the time being but those will require your old DB login. The one you create when you migrate will only be usable on DB 2.0!.

It is a sad fact that, eventually, all Members (other than the Lifetime ones) will need to set up a new subscription on the new site. The merchant account I’ve been using for this old site was created in 1999 and the data cannot be exported to modern systems.

When your payment is set up on the new site I will delete whatever you have set up here. The new site has more payment options and is much nicer to use so I expect everyone will find it easy to figure out. If your payment isn’t due for a while you don’t need to do anything right now.

Benefits of the new site??

• Modern login system (works with password managers)
• Modern mobile site
• More ultrawide resolutions
• Lossless master multiscreens (Plus Members and Above)
• Free mobile wallpapers for all (registration required)

If are aren’t a DB Member please feel free to look around and I hope you will consider supporting my work by becoming a DB Member!

Subglacial

Posted on January 15, 2022

When I originally created the geometry for "Subterrane" in Houdini I was unsure whether I wanted to create my cave out of rock or out of ice. I knew both would look interesting but I chose rock because it would render faster.

I was still curious though about how the ice would look so I tried it. The scene rendered in 19 hours vs 30 minutes but I think it looks pretty cool 😜