Starting a blog

At the suggestion of a friend, I am starting a blog about the writing of my book Illuminated Pixels: the Why, What, and How of Digital Lighting. I must admit I'm not much of a blogger, but here goes. I am in the final stretch of the book, and it has been a very long haul. I first thought to write a digital lighting book at least 5 years ago and began dabbling with chapters and outlines. i didn't really get down to business until about 2 years ago, but still - it's been a long time coming. I've had to update material as I go along, as the area of technique is always changing. Especially in the past about 5 years things have really changed in high end digital lighting. However, the fundamentals remain the same. And the book is about fundamentals as much as anything else.

Right now, however, the chapters are about technique, and I'm rendering images showing various examples of image based lighting. And gees do they take a long time. i decided to make them smaller ;)

Render Tip of the day: Reducing your render by 1/2 the size saves 3/4 the time. So my 8 inch wide, 40 minute a frame just became a 4 inch wide, 10 minute a frame render.

Image of the Day:

Simple scene (thanks to the students at SCAD-Atlanta for the frog and fly models) rendered with a single environment light and full global illumination.