rendering gallery

Starting out on the Amiga with Sculpt 3D, I have been toying with rendering programs on and off over the years. I eventually abandoned Sculpt, with its cantankerous modeler and appallingly slow rendering engine, for Imagine (originally called Turbo Silver), and I stuck with that product until NewTek released Lightwave independently of the Video Toaster. Lightwave was my modeler/renderer of choice for years, and I used it to create and render spaceships, planets, and other items, usually for work related projects.

I've since moved onto the Mac and PC, and while Lightwave is a great product on most other platforms, its Mac port has always left a lot to be desired, and I eventually adopted Specular's Infini-D. It had acceptable rendering quality, but more importantly, it introduced me to spline modeling. Using bezier curves I could create in Adobe Illustrator, Infini-D let me extrude, lathe, loft, and rail these profiles to my heart's content. It was a great program. The rendering engine was always its weakest point, but it was improving with each new version of the program. Then Metacreations took over, released an unfortunately bugged version of Infini-D, killed off the product in favor of folding its technology in with the inferior Ray Dream, and produced Carrara. Metacreations then promptly dropped all of their graphic arts software business. Eovia has since taken over production of Carrara, and it's shaping up to be a strong product.

Cinema4D has been around almost as long as Lightwave. It started out on the Amiga, but I always overlooked the program for its quirky, nonstandard interface, and weird ways of doing things. The current version, 9.5, still has a nonstandard interface, and weird ways of doing things, but it is wonderful. It has a fast, high quality rendering engine, moderately rich set of texturing tools, and a fast, responsive modeler which uses splines, hierarchical modifiers, and subdivision surfaces. This results in a fast workflow, with complex objects represented by small and fast splines which render very smoothly. Cinema4D is a very strong product, one I encourage you to investigate.

A point of comparison: I loaded the "MustangHiRes" scene that comes with Lightwave into both LW6.5 and Cinema4D 6.1. Lightwave took 5 minutes 35 seconds to render the scene at a resolution of 1280 x 960 with low antialiasing, adaptive sampling. Cinema4D rendered the same scene with 3x3 edge and color antialiasing, at 1280 x 1024 in 1 minute 52 seconds. Impressive speed.

Below, you will find some examples of my recent work in Cinema4D, from rudimentary tests of concept to more elaborate, finished works. I continue to update this page as new projects are completed. I also plan on posting some rendering tips and tutorials as time permits.

Also, check out this webgallery of game level renderings I recently created for the Tempus Irae site.

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