Posted on May 11, 2017

Aquarii

I’ve been working this scene since the middle of March, but Vue would always crash before finishing the render. It was especially frustrating because it would render almost the entire image (taking days) before finally failing. Trying to save the image would also result in a crash. Many facepalms!

Finally I decided to rebuild the entire thing from scratch and (hallelujah) I was able to get it finished. It is a continuation of the themes I started “Exobotany” and “Vaulted“. All of the foreground geometry was modeled using The Plant Factory.

I think it even looks a bit better than my original (glitchy) scene 🙂

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

Posted on April 28, 2017

Painted Sky

I’ve been chasing that “lit from below” look with my clouds for some time now. The best way to achieve it with Vue seems to be using the “spherical” render mode where your world becomes a sphere (instead of an infinite flat plain). It makes for some incredible lighting options, but unfortunately everything seems to take 5 times as long to render.

For this scene I’ve rendered the sky as a background first (as I did with “Skygate“) and then worked on the foreground as I would in the normal “flat” Vue scene. It was a lot easier to do preview renders this way 🙂

Posted on April 24, 2017

Skygate (Spring)

The past couple of Vue renders I’ve attempted have been, shall we say, troubled. Thinking that perhaps I have been jamming my scenes with too much complexity, I’ve been experimenting with breaking them up into foreground/background sections and then combining the elements so, hopefully, resources are economized and render-times are decreased.

In this case I rendered the “sky plate” first and then set it as a background object in new scene. Both renders were created on my Bucephalus workstation while Shadowfax worked to complete another render.

I apologize that my pre-occupation with finishing this one buggy scene on Shadowfax has lead to a slow month of new artwork. I do have some other irons in the fire right now so stay tuned!

Posted on March 24, 2017

Dome of the Blue Seeress (2017)

After finishing the day version multiscreen I hoped to transition immediately to creating the night version that I had planned. Unfortunately my Vue d’Esprit software had other ideas. As has happened quite a few times before, I wasn’t able to re-open my scene file to continue working on the project. After much swearing and gnashing of teeth, I managed to open an older version of the scene (without the vines) and rebuild things to where I could progress with my nocturnal version.

Unfortunately after rendering the single-screen version here Vue crashed and, once again, I wasn’t able to reopen my work. There are certainly a thing or two that I would like to tweak with this render but unfortunately that won’t be possible unless I spend another whole day rebuilding it (yet again). That also means the multiscreen version will be delayed.

Fortunately I think the render I do have looks nice enough to share. Let me know what you think!

Posted on March 18, 2017

Dome of the Blue Seeress (2017)

“Dome of the Blue Seeress“, from 2002, was one of my last projects framed specifically for 4:3 monitors. It has long been requested that I render a version for newer widescreen monitors, but for me it is almost always more fun to re-imagine an older scene (with my shiny new tools) than to do a straight-up re-render.

It has been 15 years since I rendered the original but his new version imagines that quite a bit more time has passed. Is it even the same scene at all? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

The multiscreen version is rendering now and should be available within 24 hours. Stay tuned for a night version!