Posted on May 25, 2017

Shifting Sands

Every Christmas my Mom and I exchange calendars. She receives a DB calendar and I receive the new Sierra Club offering, which hangs in our kitchen throughout the year. I am often inspired by the beautiful nature images and every once in awhile I try to recreate something from the calendar.

It so happens the May 2017 page features a lovely photo of sand dunes…

I created this scene as an exercise to learn how to better use World Machine and the Geoglyph plugin. I hope you enjoy the results!

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

Posted on May 14, 2017

Arcadia

This is a project that I developed on Bucephalus while my Shadowfax workstation was struggling to render “Aquarii“. Here I was attempting to create “willowy” trees using The Plant Factory. As the idea progressed I thought it would be more interesting to make blooming ones.

Dedicated to my lovely wife Jessica on Mother’s Day 2017! Purple is her favorite color 🙂

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 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!