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!
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.
So this is a test #2
After taking some time to adjust the site with help of custom CSS I'm fairly happy with how it turned out so far. The plan is to replace my more than a decade old site with something more easier to handle. I lay all my trust into the capable hands of Artstation in that case. Not sure when the replacement will happen but some time soon.