Posted on May 3, 2000

• Thanks to everyone who wrote with comments on “Pyre”. Most of you seemed to like it, and those that didn’t seemed to simply want a blue version. Ok, if you want a blue version, you’ll find it in the Pickle Jar.

• My project this week has been to learn World Builder’s “Z-Buffer Composer”. It basically allows you to render a scene in WB and then use Lightwave (or MAX or Maya) to add in additional elements.

  What makes this different from “Photoshopping” the image is that the Z-buffer data allows you to render objects correctly in 3D space (hidden by near objects and in front of ones far away). The process is two-way, meaning you can render a scene in Lightwave and export the render with extra Z (depth) data to World Builder.

  I chose a simple scene for my first attempt, a tornado. You can check out a hi-res render and an accompanying animation in the Picklejar. I’ve only spent a couple of days on this, but I think it looks interesting enough to share if only for the wind blowing through the trees 🙂 The texturing on the clouds needs some serious work, I know.

  Comments welcome.

Posted on April 30, 2000

• Added “Pyre” to the Interiors gallery today. I’ve also posted an animated version that you can check out (5 MB zipped AVI, 6 sec, 400 x 300). This image is my first using the Genesis plugin for Lightwave, and it should have been posted a couple of days ago except for the fact that the software is extremely unstable and has a nasty habit of crashing during the last ten seconds of an hour long render.
  If you have any comments on this render (and/or the animation), feel free to send them over!
• I’ve added zip files for the 2000 gallery and the 1600 x 1200 images posted this year. They’re on the downloads page.

Posted on April 24, 2000

• “Palisade” is new today in the Day Scenery Gallery. It should be familiar to you if you’ve checked out the “pickles” for Idyilic (specifically idyllic2.

Posted on April 20, 2000

• I was never really happy with where I left “Neptune’s Garden”. I liked the over all environment, but I didn’t like the columns and fish that I had added (see neptune4.jpg in the Picklejar). They added some contrast to the scene, but I thought they looked too fake. Yesterday I started reworking the image, essentially scrapping everything but the lighting from the first version. You can find the new render on the “New Images” page and in the Underwater Gallery. If you have any comments, be sure to send them my way.

Posted on April 19, 2000

• I’ve added 1600 x 1200 versions of “Brainstorm” and “Snowtop“.

  I also unearthed an old Bryce render that I’m sure you haven’t seen yet. I don’t know why I never posted this back when I created it last May. The image is titled, simply, “Gecko” and you can check it out in the 1999 Day Scenery Gallery. The Gecko model came off of the Ray Dream Studio CD-ROM. Yes, the gecko does have a mouth, it’s just hard to see 🙂