I’ve had about a week downtime due to a horrible Internet Provider and I’m doing a lot of catch up right now.
Just so you all know that this place is not dead - I just stopped existing for a bit.

Rising Sun is an atmosphere pack made by Paul. Instead of making sunsets he decided to make sunrises this time around

There are 10 very nice atmospheres in this pack and I can recommend it. Give your render the hope of a new day with these sunrises

Price is $12.00.

Today we have got a new atmosphere pack in store, made by Paul Trepanier.
It is a collection of 10 very foggy atmospheres that will give your scene that little extra scary or creepy feeling to it. Or, you can use them for anything you like, of course.

In this pack there is a ReadMe file, and Paul added that because the fog settings can be a bit confusing, which slide to use etc. But it’s all in the package.

As usual, it’s $10 and it is included in the Featured Products on the index page in the store.

There’s a bit of news from this end of the universe today.

The LightVue family was expanded with a new member earlier today. A forum where you can ask questions, make suggestions, requests, comment, complain or just sit down and have a java

You need to be registered in the store to access these forums, so login at the store with your username and password to get to the link. For now the store and the forum is not fully integrated, so you will have to sign up at the forums separately.
I apologize about this inconvenience, but it all comes down to technical aspects that works only in theory and I’m searching for a solution so that new members in the store doesn’t have to go through with two separate registrations.

In the meantime, when you sign up for the forums, please use the email address that you used when you signed up in the store. That way it is easier to help you if you have questions about something you bought in the store earlier.

There are also two fields in the registration process for the forum that was added especially for LightVue. One is what version of Vue you’re using. It’s a mandatory field mostly because it makes it easier for other members to help you and neither of us have to repeat that in the posts.

The other field is a username field that refers to Renderosity’s username. If you are a member at Rosity both me and Paul have most likely seen you before if you are active in either the galleries or the forums…or both.
This field is entirely up to you if you want to use or not. If you’re using the same name at LightVue Forums as you do at Rosity, you can ignore that field all together.

Again, it’s a matter of recognizing people.

Other than forums we have some new atmospheres coming up. Paul has got a pack of very foggy atmospheres that will be added to the store shortly.
And I’ve got some loose ends to gather into a pack that will be added in about the same time.

The movie “Sky Captain & The World of Tomorrow” was on my mind when I made this render earlier today. I saw bits and pieces out of that movie last night, and it wasn’t the first time either. Since I really enjoy everything about the 1940’s, the light and the design of that movie always blows me away and I miss the story every time.

So when I arranged these planes during the afternoon and tweaked an atmosphere from my latest pack, Painted Dreams, all I could do was to get that special light that was used all the way throughout that movie.

The planes were made by Anders Lejczak and they are for free, including textures and everything. Well worth the download I might add. The water is by gillbrooks at Renderosity.

I also downloaded some sky trails for free, but I need to learn how to use them. Doesn’t seem to matter what kind of cloud material I use on those obj’s, it simply vanish when it’s time to render in any case.
Something to fiddle with on a rainy day

Today I’m trying out the Batch render function in Vue 6 xStream. Since my machine is tiny compared to what Vue really wants and need to run smooth, I need to find an alternative way to render a scene in a big resolution. And so far so good. The standalone render seems to work well. I still haven’t seen the end result yet, but compared to the time it would take to render the same resolution on screen, it’s a lot faster.

If the visual result will be just as good as the render time, I’m all for it

However, either my Firefox is broken or the standalone render is interfering with certain scripts. The site mail at Renderosity looks like a disaster and the iFrame where you are suppose to write your message is already filled with all sorts of nifty characters. Google Reader is acting up too…and all of those sites works just fine in Opera. So I’m thinking that there are certain things that doesn’t get along with the standalone render. After all, it’s all a bunch of scripts.

The render above was something I put together late last night. Very late, as a matter of fact. It was close to 3 AM before I finally set it to render.
The tall bottles was something I picked up from Archive.net as a freebie and I just had to put them into a scene somehow. They got a shape that I really like

Today it’s time for some updates in the store again. And it’s more clouds.
Both packs were made by Paul Trepanier in Vue 6 Infinite.

All of these clouds are spectral and of professional quality. They’re perfect if you choose to make your own atmospheres or if you want to add some spice to the atmospheres you already have.

The first pack can be found here.
And the second pack over here.

And as stated before, these packs are clouds only and does not include atmospheres. Also, you cannot use them for meta clouds. It is not the right kind of clouds.

Both are $10.00 each.

I’ve been busy making a couple of renders for the Stonemason Contest at Daz3D, so the atmosphere creation has fallen behind a bit. I’m still working on what might be a new pack in the end, once I’ve decided what will go in the trash and what will end up in store.

Other plans for LightVue is taking shape as well, so far only in my mind. I’ve discussed them with Paul and we agree that if the plans I have to get my photo studio running won’t happen within this next month, I will focus my efforts on the store here instead and expand.
In that case LightVue will be much bigger and there will be room for new vendors and we will sell more products for Vue than just atmospheres. After all, we all need models and materials as well.

So if things are going that way there will be a lot of work upgrading the store.
Otherwise, LightVue will stay the way it is today and we will continue to sell atmospheres.
Can’t have both.
If the bank agree to lend me the money I need for the photo studio, I will be way too busy off screen to expand LightVue and maintain it. There’s a lot of work behind all this even if it doesn’t look like it from the front end.

All this will become clear within the next month in any case.

It’s rare that I do any sunset renders and I’m not really sure why. Maybe because I like to have my scenes lit up a bit more. And sunset atmospheres are not really what I do a lot of either.

However, yesterday this render happened by accident and it was not what I planned to do.

The atmosphere is one of two sunset atmospheres in my latest pack Painted Dreams. I’ve rotated the camera to the right since that’s where the sun is in this atmosphere. Originally you can’t see the sun itself when you load it into a default scene.
I often do this since Vue create the sky all around the scene and not just in front of the camera….something that can be easy to forget. An atmosphere can look very different in other directions, so it’s fun to experiment with.

Also, I decided to render this in a format that I rarely use just to focus on the sunset itself.

Many beaches here in England got these small colorful cabins where people can get changed from regular clothing to their swimming suits. Since they are so colorful they really stand out. It’s a neat contrast to the green grass and the sand.

I was working all day yesterday on that silly render above. Somehow I was hoping that some time away from landscapes would make it easy to do again, but I guess I was wrong. To paint the ecosystem was the easy part…but then it went straight downhill from there.
Just a glitch in the creative process.

However, I do have some new ideas for some atmospheres working somewhere in the back of my head, so I might be able to do that instead