There is not one single Iray render on this page. These are painted raytraces ... and a couple of them were done in Studio 3, so long ago, I'd forgotten the even existed, till I started trawling through the ancient archives, mending this blog (taking out the dead links, removing the "404 images" and tidying up loose ends that didn't go anywhere). Then I started to look at the best raytraces of 2019 ... and I looked, and looked some more ...
I dug back further, to 2012 and 2011, and started to haul out some of the best of those ancient renders, and ... I put them into Photoshop. Ye gods and little fishes, to quote my Irish granny.
Here's the thing of it: for about ten years now, everybody has been running desperately towards photorealism, demanding that Studio renders be ever closer to photographs. Even I bought into that! And honestly, I should have known better --
I'm a painter! I'm an artist, not a fashion photographer or whatever. Sure, I managed to get a number of excellent renders that were very, very close to photo, but, but but ... why? Honestly, why?
Here's the bottom line. The closer the images came to photographs, the less I was interested. The artist in me, the painter, was being starved out. I got bored and drifted away from DAZ, 3D, CG, and I've been away for about a year now, I think. The artist in me is awake again. I've spent the last few days repainting old renders ... old raytraces ... and I'm tickled pink with the results.
Call this an ode to raytracing. I feel the artist in me coming back ... I feel the desire to start up Studio again, and render something the old-fashioned way, and they -- paint. Yes, paint!
