After an almost exactly 7 year break I'm close to finish up the third part of my Endeavours series. A collection of artwork that took me more than a year to finish. Not on and off but "when the time was right" work. I'm still touching up certain parts but I'm ready to release it into the wild now. I'm also thinking about breaking out of that (all at once) mode and create work for the series whenever I feel it's right. I'll see. There is something nice about having a series finished and ready to go. It's less fragmented. However... just thoughts. For now I'm glad I had the opportunity to continue this series. Looking back at the last two years, there were moments when I couldn't care less about this. I've overcome that part relatively quick but it's still there to a degree. 7 years... so many things can happen in 7 years.
For now, this old school teaser image.
Endeavours III
Vue & Plant Factory are now FREE
Personal
Vue and I go a long way back. So long back that it makes me feel really damn old. 2002, in my artistic infancy, I played with Vue for the first time and decided... I'm not there yet. So I continued trying and using techniques that suited my workflow at that time. Three or four years later I got back to it and (with the things learned by then) liked it and looked for ways to make it an integral part of my arsenal of tools. Vue helped me learn so many things about 3d and how it can provide a solid building ground for visualizing the ideas in my head. It grew in my appreciation and soon shared my #1 spot of tools with Photoshop. Over the years it allowed me to be creative in ways I never thought possible. I didn't need the super complex 3dsmax or Cinema4D solutions. That came later with Blender.
Nature scenes off of a fantasy movie. Giant futuristic cityscapes. A crazy big fortress on the side of a mountain. Spaceships off the shoulder of Orion! All with a healthy portion of Photoshop and applying Digital Matte Painting techniques to make it really big! Big enough to make it into art books. Always mentioning the software. Making Vue immortal. Sounds schmaltzy but... that's how I feel.
Later my work captured the eye of the guys behind Vue and made it possible for me to become a beta tester. That was amazing and I'll be forever grateful for that chance. Mainly because Vue wasn't always easy to handle at that time. Being a tester allowed me to report stuff to exactly the guys who were able to look into it and fix it. Whatever the issue was. Friendly communication with only one goal... make the tool better. And better it became.
History
Vue always had that niche existence. Although it's been used by VFX studios all over the world, it never found a firm footing in their pipelines. Vue was, for some time, even ahead of the curve by using procedural mechanics for materials or objects like terrains. Now a staple in all kinds of 3d tools. But VFX isn't the only field that uses Vue. Archviz is a big one too! Due to its Python capabilities (which were there very early on) it is very flexible and in combo with its sister tool Plant Factory even became interesting for scientific research projects all over the world.
Official Statements, Downloads and FAQs:
https://www.bentley.com/software/e-on-software-free-downloads/
Free & Powerful
The bad news is... it won't be continued. No bug fixes. No further development. The good news is... it's available for free now. Along with Plant Factory and its extensive plant catalog. In combination with Blender (which I dove into three years ago) it's a very solid foundation in all things 3d. I would highly encourage everyone in the or interested in the fields of 3d to check out Vue and Plant Factory. Feel invited to check my gallery for what's visually possible with this package!
Thanks
Last but not least I want to thank everyone involved with E-On Software over the years for making Vue and PF what it is today and allowing me (through their work) to do my work! I feel sad that development will not be continued. They've had some really great stuff in the pipeline for future releases. Now I hope Vue will, once again, find its niche and continue to live on... now "everyone" can try it.
Have fun everyone!
AURORA - Freestyle 3
I'm a proud part of an artgroup called AURORA. It's a mixup of member by former artgroup THE LUMINARIUM and COSMOSYS. International member from all around the world. Two days ago we managed to put out our latest release. This time we decided to go freestyle so it was wild west for everyone ilvolved. Usually we have topics. The most recent were metals Bronze, Silver and Gold. Some neat submissions in there as well! But now... check out our newest. I contributed two picture and as usual am proud to be a part of it!
Recent Photophun!
Alvarialis - New Terrain Resource/Asset
It's been a while and I took my time with this one. But here we are with a new asset, Overall I was going for a more rocky desert feel for this one. There went quite some time into tuning the appearance of the terrain and its materials. As usual the terrain comes with a collections of masks and colormaps. I'm always having fun playing with the textures.
Design of the terrain happened in Gaea and was refined during the process. Materials and masks were created by using Gaea and Geoglyph2 for World Machine. Working on the textures was a bit tedious but also fun once I found my workflow. Overall I'm happy with this one and hope it can be useful for your projects.
You can find the terrainin my store:
Univers Imaginaires Book Release
I actually wanted to post this much sooner but... life. Last year I got contacted by Citadelles & Mazenod. They asked if I would like to contribute to a book that covers all the great literature of fantasy and science fiction. Talking about the authors and their influence on all kinds of media. This is at least what I think... the book is in french. I can't read french, unfortunately. This book is so comprehensive and full of illustrations that fit the overall theme so well. May it be traditionally or digitally created. Therefor it's quite a big and heavy book. Also limited to 2000 prints. Let's just say to have two of my pieces in a book like that with all the greats... is humbling and makes me proud. Thanks to everyone involved who made this ego boost possible. So very much appreciated!
It's Alive!
Over the past 3 days I did some extra polish to the site. Now I think it's ready to go. Along with it I want to celebrate the new site with a new artwork that will follow soon. Overall the website is completely focused on my digital art. Creating the site was fun and challenging. Not much CSS knowledge and all that. Now it's time. For some reason I'm a tiny bit excited. Let's go!
Not A Test Anymore
So far so good. Did some more adjustments and managed to kill some design issues that were really bugging me. It won't take long anymore and I can release this new website into the wild. Had to dig through CSS (which I'm not super familiar with) and managed to get the CSS work to my liking. A tiny bit proud of that!
So this is a test #4
I'm closing in on completion of the modifications. Also added my MEET THE INSPIRATION interview series in the MISC section of the site. There still are some design inconsistencies on the site that I'm trying to fix. However... the site is already in a stage that tempts me to release it. It won't take too long now.
So this is a test #3
Alrighty. A lot of optimization went into the CSS over the past couple of days. I cannot say I fully understand how CSS works but I'm fairly happy how it does so far. Not much left to do before the site can finally be released into the wild west of the internet. I'm a little excited too. It'll make things a lot easier I hope.