It was huge fun. But in the endless quest for better and better renders ... renders that look like photos, or movie stills ... dang, you can lose sight of the FUN. You end up with one image that you slaved on all day, and no story. Eventually, the magic just goes away and in the end ... phhttt. If you're like me, when the magic goes away, you can't get into it anymore.
So ... in search of the old, old magic, I've been rummaging through the Ancient Archives, pulling some of these antediluvian images into Photoshop and giving them the treatment...
Now, nothing, repeat nothing, is going to take a Deep Shadow Map or the simplest possible raytrace you can get (because the PC will crash if you ask for anything more), and turn it into the kind of image you were seeing from me in 2019. But having said that --
-- dangitall, I had some great ideas in 2010 - 2012. All my best ideas date from this period. Not the best work. The best ideas. My best CG work dates from 2019-2020. Yes, to some extent, Photoshop can make many of these pictures much more presentable for viewing today, but nothing replaces the know-how, the hardware and the software to simply ... make better pictures.
Now, in 2010, this was the best I could do with the hardware at my disposal:
Fast forward thirty months, and this was doable:
Due to one thing and another (Real Life: my mother passed away after a loooong illness; I landed in the hospital for two surgeries; had a fall, spent some time in a wheelchair, then hopped on crutches for six months ...) I took a few years out of CG art, any kind of art. Then I came back, in 2019, and while we were still raytracing, those raytraces looked like this now:
But even so, the fun had fifty percent gone. I was imagining the stories that went with these images, but I never wrote them. Looking back into the Ancient Archives, I used to write stories all the time. Much later, I "went pro" -- I've been in ANALOG Science Fiction twice! But the old fun never came back as I hunted and hunted for that cutting-edge Iray render, all that photorealism. In the end ... I quit altogether, took another couple of years out, and came back as a digital painter! And don't get me wrong --
Digital painting is actually where my heart lies. This is me painting with my new Huion pen tablet, in 2023:
...but I'm remembering the sheer fun of spinning yarns and illustrating them with raytraces that are sooo quick to do, you can end up with four or five ina session. Heaven knows, you take something so old, it's been gathering dust for an eon, let Photoshop loose on it, and end up with this:
So ... my fingertips are actually starting to tingle to start up Studio and ... and ... and ...!
