Posted on July 2, 2000

• After modeling all those buildings, I decided my Spire City needed a more believeable atmosphere. Unfortunately this is not Lightwave’s strong point (unlike a a dedicated landscape modeler like Bryce or World Builder). The sky looked nice but the scene needed some haze to give everything a sense of scale.

  The past few days were spent trying out different approaches. I’m not sure any of them were successful, but a couple of the renders came out kind of nice. One is a day shot and the other is the much requested night version. Both are up for your review on the new images page.

Posted on June 28, 2000

• My second hi-res render of “Spire City” is now up for your review on the New Images page. As you can see, the city is growing. I’m still painting with broad strokes on this one and I’ll be playing around with it some more before the everything falls into place and I start concentrating on little details.

  Thanks to everyone who sent me comments and suggestions so far. Most of you wanted to see a darker image, so I’ve toned down the sunlight somewhat. My mom (of all people) wrote me and said that some bridges would look cool, so I added two simple ones.

  Anyway, there’s still lots to do with this one. Hope you like where it’s going.

Posted on June 27, 2000

• As mentioned last time, I am working on a new cityscape. I’ve posted my first hi-res test render on the New Images page for your review. Unlike “Gotham 1999” I’m trying to model each building individually instead of using clones, so this one is taking a little more time than my average wallpaper. Gotham ’99 used maybe three different building meshes, this one has over 12 so far.

  I plan on adding a lot more to this image. The ocean is really just a placeholder and I plan on adding more architecture to the scene, along with better atmospheric effects. I’d also like to see a few flying craft zipping about here and there. Maybe some billboards…

  Anyway, the gist of what I am saying here is that this image is in the rough stages. I’d love to hear your comments on it though.

Posted on June 25, 2000

• Stars are pretty easy to make when they are far away. All you need is a white dot or maybe a little lens flare. Up close, however, they’re a little more complicated. Still, I wanted to give it a shot and you can see the result in “Stellar“, my latest upload. It can be found on the New Images page and in the Planetscapes gallery.

  I thought about adding more elements to this one, but in the end I decided the “simple look” made the best wallpaper. I think the biggest challenge was making a “realistic” looking star that didn’t blind you when you looked at it. Anyway, what do you think?

• Vue d’Esprit simply refuses to render a 1600 x 1200 version of “Overlord“. I’ll try again when they update their beta.
• Coming up next: a new cityscape. Stay tuned.

Posted on June 22, 2000

• Ever since I heard that Vue d’Esprit 3.1 was multi-threaded, I’ve wanted to try it out. Sunday I downloaded the latest beta (Ver. 6), installed it, and got busy setting up a scene to show off this “citidel-looking” mesh that I had built in Lightwave. I was hoping to post it for you back on Monday, but unfortunately that was not to be.

  To make a long story short, Vue 3.1.6 seems to have a nasty bug. From what I can tell, a memory leak occurs during the last anti-aliasing pass. It slows the render to a crawl, and then crashes the program entirely just when the render is complete. As you might imagine, it is no fun to render an image for 12-14 hours only to lose it all at the very last moment. This has happened to me 4 times this week and, of course, the files created with the new beta will not open in previous versions of the software.

  The bug only occurs when I try a “render to screen” at 1600 x 1200. Vue has another option (“render to disk”), but for some strange reason the render times are multiplied by 10 whenever it’s used. I decided to render the image at 1152 x 864 using my main workstation, and render it to disk at 1600 x 1200 using one of my other computers.

  Hopefully that explains why this latest image, Overlord is a couple days late and a size smaller than I usually post. The 1600 x 1200 version will be up shortly (I hope). I didn’t intend for this to be a big time consumer, just a fun refresher exercise with a neat software package that I’ve been neglecting. The fun part, I guess, was in putting the scene together. Hopefully it shows and you’ll enjoy the wallpaper.

  I’d love to hear your comments on this image, and/or Vue d’Esprit, so don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

  I think I’ll move on to something else now….