Virtual Creation: Foreground, Part I
Last time I shaded the beach using a terrain shader, producing the sandy beach areas as well as the rich brown earth and dirt under the forest. I wasn't entirely happy with how the sand appeared, but I think I have an idea about what may have gone wrong. I'll get to...
When Stable Isn’t
So perhaps you've noticed that my posting rate has dropped off. There are several reasons for that. First, I'm preparing to head back to Atlanta to visit friends and family for almost two weeks; planning for that has taken quite a bit of time. Second, and perhaps more...
Virtual Creation: Painting the Beach
Slowly but surely I've been building this beach scene. First I set up the scene basics. Then I added some background details: a forest and a sailboat. (I had planned and done more, but the program crashed to desktop before I saved my progress.) Looking at the earlier...
Virtual Creation: Background Details
I'm sorry for how late this post is coming out; I had planned on having it up early this morning, but another image took slightly longer to render than I had hoped! Now that it's finished, however, I'm really happy about how it looks: and now I can continue with...
Why Reinventing the Wheel is Good
A comment on the second installment of my Virtual Creation series caught my eye. In particular, I love software programs that have “tools” to create things … color options and the whole range – but at the same time are we ever complete masters of our software...
Virtual Creation: Building a Beach
In the previous post of the series, I discussed my goals for the series and gave a quick introduction on "virtual photography". Now we're ready to actually dive in! As I said last time my goal is to produce a tropical beach image -- the kind of image that gets you...
Virtual Creation: Introduction
Welcome to my series Virtual Creations. Here you'll get to "peek" over my shoulder as I go through the process of creating a new image from scratch. Note that my goal is not to produce a tutorial on the correct way to go about making computer artwork. Instead, I have...
A Test Post and A Recipe
One of the annoying things about setting things up is making sure that things interact correctly. For example, I added a new thermostat to our house shortly after we moved in. But I needed to make sure that the thermostat worked... which meant I had to make sure that...
Under Construction
Well, this is it -- a blog of my very own. Pardon the dust and noise and mess please; it's still under construction. Feel free to look around; there's not much to see now, but as I complete the building process there will be more and more available. My gallery is...