Variations on a Theme

 After I got home Saturday from the Music Fest for MDA, where I played in the classic rock band MOZO, I was dead tired but needed to unwind for a while. So I spent a couple of hours editing some of my 3D-modeled pictures. I posted the original of this one a few days ago. Here are some new versions of the same shot.

There are things about each of these that I like. I find it interesting that merely changing the colors of various elements can evoke such different moods. I'll probably use all these (as well as other variations of the same pic) as backgrounds for some of my other 3D models.

The original picture (which I posted last time) was made in Bryce 7.1 Pro. All the editing - on that shot and these - was done in Gimp 2.6.

D-Day, Bradbury and Cloud City revisited

Well, the day is almost over, but it's worth mentioning anyhow: Happy D-Day! On June 6, 1944, the Allied forces launched the Normandy Invasion, which was a major turning point in the European theatre of World War II.

I heard the news today: Ray Bradbury passed away on Tuesday. One of my all-time favorite writers (of any genre), he will be sorely missed. Two of the earliest science fiction collections I read as a kid were R IS FOR ROCKET and S IS FOR SPACE. Later, I picked up THE ILLUSTRATED MAN and THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, which carried some of the same stories interspersed with some darker, more mature stories; nonetheless, those two juvenile collections that I borrowed several times from my elementary school library were, to me, the best Bradbury. All the stories were thrilling to a ten or eleven year old, and that all-important sense of wonder (which is missing in so much modern SF) prevailed throughout.

Okay, with that out of the way, I wanted to share a few pictures that I have scavenged off my nearly dead Toshiba notebook (the fan is going bad: it stops running at times and the computer overheats and shuts off). Hopefully, I'll have the computer fixed within the next week or two. In the meantime, here are a couple of new views of the Cloud City tutorial I worked when I was learning to use Bryce back in February.

 
Here is an earlier render. In the newer pictures, I played around with camera angles and lighting a lot more than I had at first.

I've been submitting artwork to the Illustrators of the Future Contest. They offer quarterly prizes as well as a grand prize and publication in the annual Writers of the Future anthology. So far, I haven't been among the winners(I've also been submitting stories to the Writers of the Future Contest). One of the pictures I submitted this quarter was produced by combining some elements of several CG renders I had done in DAZ3D and Bryce. The following is the shot I used as the background of said picture. I think it stands on its own pretty well.

As soon as I get the Toshiba running reliably again, I'll post some more stuff. Drawings and 3D renders. And maybe a story or a comic strip. Until then, keep both feet on the wheel!