Sorry to say the render is on hiatus at the moment while I finish a couple of other more pressing (and quicker rendering) projects. It basically works on my alternate box when it has nothing else to do. I sure hope to post it someday as I think the middle screen will take the place of the current single-screen.

I have been running this one on my alternate computer between other projects. The simple fact is that it is taking forever due to the cloud effects, but would look lame without them. Patience!

...after all these days!

I have a multiscreen render of this chugging away on my alternate box. I've reworked some things so it will take a little less time to complete than the single-screen, but it's still taking forever...

"The Forest Citadel" took forever to render. The part it really grinded on was the fog layer. I used Vue's spectral clouds for it and set the opacity really low.

Basically, the more you can see through the clouds the more expensive they are CPU-wise. Yes, they will slow down the multi-screen render so I may try omitting them or substituting Vue's built in fog.

Bottom line, the multiscreen may look a bit different than the single-screen.



I am going to try a new rendering strategy for Vue d'Esprit. Before I would render at 2560 x 1600 using the "Ultra" setting. The results were great but the render times were starting to get out of hand.

I finally opened the Vue manual (yeah, I know) and read that the "Final" setting should provide similar results with much less time. I'll try that and render a good bit larger than 2560 x 1600 (i.e.: oversample). Then I will scale the image down in Photoshop and that should make everything look nice and smooth.

According to my simple tests so far I could cut render times by over 60%. We'll see...

My apologies Laura. I guess you could say I am astraphilic. Just a warning, my next wallpaper might provide problems for the acrophobic out there.

I knew both the grain and the "gloom" would be mentioned. It is tricky making dark images look good on every monitor. I've taken the approach to make it look as good as possible on my screen and hope it degrades well, rather than crank up the brightness and put out something that doesn't look good to me.



I actually added the noise after the render in Photoshop. Vue had produced some unacceptable color banding in the final render and the only way to clean it up was to add a little grain to the image. It was the lesser of two evils.



Folks wanting something brighter will really enjoy my next wallpaper I think :)