Posted on October 20, 1999

• “Modern Prometheus”, sort of a Halloween pic I guess, is new today in the Posers gallery and the WIP. For those of you who use Poser 4, the “Monster” is a Poser figure deformed by the Magnet tool.

  Almost ashamed to tell you all this, but I bought myself a new computer yesterday. My original plan was to pick up a decent sub $1000 box to help me render the print versions of my images (these are taking a week or more on my P333). Lately, however, Windows 98 has been acting up on me (more than usual) to the point where I’ve been losing files and the hours of work that went into them. Win98 simply can’t go where I want to go today.

  So instead of buying some cheapo Celeron to act as my renderbox, I’ve decided to demote my current machine to that position. Taking it’s place will be a Dell Precision 410 workstation with dual PIII 600 processors, 1 GB ECC SDRAM, and a 36 GB SCSI disk. The machine will be running Windows NT, which I’ve heard is a great deal more stable and powerful than 98. I didn’t feel like messing with Athlon processors right now, even though they’re supposedly much faster than the Intel chips. Xeon processors were a little pricey for my blood, and I’m not sure what benefit they provide for the extra money.

  I’ve purchased a copy of Inspire 3D, the “Learning Edition” of Lightwave 3D. Inspire, so I’ve read, has about 80% of Lightwave’s features for only 25% the price. I plan on using Inspire to cut my teeth on the Lightwave interface before I get the full edition.

  Why’d I chose Lightwave? Probably because 3DS MAX doesn’t have a $400 “Light” edition and I don’t want to be overwhelmed by features when I’m trying to learn. I’ve seen some really cool work done with Lightwave (ever seen “Titanic” or “Babylon 5”?). It’s also what my idol, the Digital Knight, uses 🙂

  Why do I need all this horsepower? The simplistic answer is that the more CPU you have, the closer you get to that mythical “instant feedback” which all 3D designers (myself included) crave. The more memory you have, the more detailed your world can be. The two are inversely proportional, so more of one means less of the other. Somewhere in the middle is 3D nirvana, and that’s where I want to go today.

  Hopefully all this will mean cooler graphics for you in Y2K. After all, you paid for the machine with your membership fee. All I ask from you is a little patience while I climb the learning curve.

Posted on October 18, 1999

• “Equatorial” is new today in the Night Scenery gallery and the WIP. This is the image I was working on when the Earthquake hit Saturday morning.

  No, I haven’t forgotten about the Halloween renders I mentioned yesterday. Soon!

Posted on October 17, 1999

• I’ve been working on a little search engine for the member’s gallery, so you can easily find the image you want without wading through all the gallery pages. It’s in beta mode now (I spent yesterday afternoon working on it), which means it’s ready for you to test out. It doesn’t do keyword searches (yet) so you’ll still have to know at least part of the image title (i.e. “Afterglow”, “Overlook 1999”, etc) in order to find anything. All the seasonal images are now included with the main member’s gallery and you can use the search engine to list them out by holiday (type “halloween”, for example, to get at all my halloween pics).

  Speaking of Halloween, I have done two additional halloween renders but I’m not quite ready to post them. They’ll probably be ready by tomorrow morning when I open my free halloween gallery to the public. Of course, I’ll preview them here first.

• I’ve added a directory of PNG versions of my 1600 x 1200 renders, for those who can’t stand even a little bit of JPG compression. Warning, these files are LARGE. The directory index can be found here. The files are large, but they’re way smaller than BMP versions. You may, however, need special software to view the images if your browser doesn’t support the PNG format. Netscape users will have to download the ZIP versions of the files.

Posted on October 16, 1999

• It’s 3:00 am and I’m sitting here working on a new picture when all of a sudden everything starts moving around. My first Earthquake; pretty freaky for this son of an Illinois corn farmer.

Posted on October 13, 1999

• I sat down last night (this morning actually) to make another Halloween wallpaper, but what I came up with has nothing at all to do with Halloween. Sorry. It’s still kind of scary though (to me anyway). The image is called “F=MA” (as in Newton’s Law of Force) and you can check it out in the Planetscapes gallery and the WIP.