Just a couple of pieces today because believe it or not, it took most of the afternoon and some of the evening to get these! There are images that just refuse to be rendered on this system -- in the above, I can have either shadows or reflections, I can have either opacity or reflections. Try for both, and the result is a crash to the desktop. Very annoying. Notice, in the top shot you have reflections, in the second shot you have shadows -- not both together! Grrrr.
Anyway, the idea for this came out the Pure Blond beer commercial that's screening down here at this moment. You're going to love this -- it also looks great full-screen, so click on the icon. I scaled it down to 400 wide to get it to fit the Blogger page, but it definitely deserves to be seen full screen:
Edit: nope. The video has gone. Pity, because it was quite amusing. Sigh...
... as I said in the post title, "Welcome to Shangrila ... than you for not burping," and since the Pure Blond commercial isn't there anymore, this won't make a lot of sense! Argh.
And I dream dreams of having a computer with a whole lot more power, so I can render scenes which are in my head, but which just can't be done on this machine. I watched The Making of Avatar a couple of weeks ago, and it was amusing -- James Cameron was talking about how he and Weta Digital devised new special effects technologies which pushed the hardware further than it wanted to go. The result? Crash! Even for Weta Digital. So I'm in good company!
Jade, 23 January
