Posted on August 30, 2016

360 Panoramas!

What started as a fun diversion on my Facebook page has turned into a possible push into the VR world for me. Hope to have more to report on that front soon. For now I’ve rendered 6 360 panoramas that you can check out right here on DB (without having to visit Facebook).

Let the pages load fully and then drag about with your mouse/finger to look around.

Any requests?

Posted on August 19, 2016

The Fire Within

I guess I wasn’t quite done with my cave itch when I posted “Bones of the Earth“. I had the idea here to create a scene lit from below by lava. The snow came relatively near the end but I think it makes a nice contrast.

I may still have an edit or two in store for this one, but I thought it looked interesting enough to share as is. Hope you enjoy it!

Posted on August 9, 2016

Whirlwind

A companion piece to “Thunderhead“. I used what I learned designing those cloud formations to make a convincing environment for a tornado I modeled using The Plant Factory.

I may still tweak a thing or two with this one before I’m finished, but I thought it looked nice enough to share for now.

Compare to the original “Whirlwind” from 2000!

PS: My renders are usually an escape for me from the flatness of Central Illinois, but the foreground in this piece very much embraces it

Posted on August 1, 2016

Thunderhead

I was born and raised in central Illinois, which is very flat country (flattened by a glacier 10,000 years ago), and cumulonimbus clouds are our versions of mountains. I first attempted to model one back back in 1999 using texture mapped spheres. This version with 2016 technology uses Vue’s Spectral 2 clouds.

Posted on July 26, 2016

Class M

First off I would like to mention that for the first time in 10 years, DB is living on a new server. I’ve been working hard migrating the site to the new box over the past week and I think I’ve ironed out most of the bugs. The new machine will give me a platform to hopefully create a whole new site soon!

When I wasn’t tinking with my code I was creating a new render. I recently finished the excellent “Red Rising Trilogy by Pierce Brown and his vision of a terraformed Mars inspired me to create this piece. I used Vue d’Esprit’s “spherical” terrains and dug deep into the cloud editor to create this render.

There was one location from the books in particular that I wanted to recreate and this piece could be considered a warmup for that 🙂 I hope you enjoy it!