Posted on October 30, 2017

Animus (Happy Halloween!)

Happy Halloween! Ever since I started learning The Plant Factory I’ve had the idea to create a “tree character” and it seemed like Halloween was the right time to try it out. The central figure and the “hands” were all created using Plant Factory and the scene was rendered using Vue. Sort of abstract, sort of landscape…if this render isn’t to your liking I hope will check out the rest of my Halloween collection!

I almost didn’t have it ready in time for 10/31 because my original version had some volumetric ground fog that I had to remove in order to shorten the render time. Maybe I will be able to finish that version someday…

Posted on October 23, 2017

Electric Dahlia

A few years ago we journeyed back to San Diego with the kids and visited Balboa Park one day. There happened to be a dahlia exhibition and contest going on and I was simply amazed at the diversity, beauty and complexity of this type of flower. I resolved to model one someday and here it is (with my own spin of course). One last flower before winter sets in for 2017. I modeled the blooms and set up the UVs in Plant Factory and finished the texturing in Lightwave.

Non-watermarked lossless 8K version available to Lifetime Supporters and Plus Level Members (and above). Multiscreen versions are coming soon!

Posted on October 18, 2017

Peace in the Valley

Jessie and I recently watched Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novik’s excellent “Vietnam War” documentary on PBS. It was a gut-wrenching series and more than a little bit surreal to think how I wouldn’t have Jess by my side if not for the war.

Throughout the series I was struck by the incredible beauty of the Vietnamese countryside. It was that ethereal beauty which inspired this latest render, “Peace in the Valley”.

Non-watermarked lossless 8K version available to Lifetime Supporters and Plus Level Members (and above). Multiscreen versions are available!

Posted on October 15, 2017

Autumn Palette

This one is another Plant Factory experiment where I am attempting to vary the coloring of my leaves per individual tree. Most Vue plants have one leaf color (and thus look unconvincing in autumn renders) but here I’ve created a tree with five different color “zones” . The bottom leaves are purplish, red above that, then orange, then yellow and green at the tops. The Vue scene is a test of sorts to see how they look together in a “natural” setting.

Basically it’s a doodle of sorts, but I thought it looked nice enough to share. Let me know what you think!

Non-watermarked lossless 8K version available to Lifetime Supporters and Plus Level Members (and above). Multiscreen versions are coming!

Posted on October 12, 2017

Gateway

Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet lately around here. I’ve actually had my head down working on several brand new renders and finally one of them is ready to share…

I’ve long been fascinated by “portals” and they have often figured prominently in my work. For this scene I used The Plant Factory to model the “gateway” and then used my “Core World” render as the “destination”.

Non-watermarked lossless 8K version available to Lifetime Supporters and Plus Level Members (and above). Multiscreen versions are coming!