It is with great sadness that I pass this news over to you. I’ve just read Rob Rodriguez announcing the 36th PhotoWorks Rendering contest, which will also be the final one.  I feel a bit bummed out, I can’t deny it.  I mean, the rendering contest is a really neat idea and I wish it could continue to be, somehow, that someone could take over and host it for Rob, I don’t know… I even consi...

This is meant to be just a quick post to answer Chris’s question about the color effect on the front of the Mach 4 image that was my entry for last month’s Rendering Contest.  In short, that effect is achieved by using a solid color as a decal and a mask, only instead of black and white the mask is a gradient of grey tones that act pretty much like a sifter, allowing more of the color to be ...

Well, the PhotoWorks/PhotoView  Rendering Contest is over and a winner has been declared… and of course, it wasn’t me. Congratulations to Cilas Gimenez for a super cool render! The really sad part for me is that I got even less votes this time than the last one. Well, guess I have to practice a bit more! This is my entry to the contest, by the way. I only got three votes for this one this tim...

As I mentioned previously, setting lights in PhotoWorks still seems tricky to me.  You can usually get by just using the light schemes pre-set in each scene, but if you want to add a special effect or get the shadow and shapes of objects just right, then you usually need to work with lights. SolidWorks has different kinds of lights available to customize and “play” with. There’s the ambient...

The more I learn about PhotoWorks, the more I like it, even when some of the options can be quite tricky or require extra effort, like when setting up lights, for instance. It can be hard to figure out exactly where to put them, how many and how bright, but it’s a real advantage to be able to set those lights in the first place.  I must say of all the different options there are, I really like ...

Even though I’m the one who usually takes most of our family pictures (which also explains why I hardly ever appear in them), I can’t tell that I’ve ever been handy with a camera. If you don’t believe me, just ask my son Andrew. This is what he’ll probably have to say about my skills as a photographer. Anyway, even when real life cameras can sometimes be quite frustrating for me, I mu...

The winner of the contest has finally been announced over at Rob Rodriguez Blog. No, it wasn’t me, of course. It was Fabien Bernadet, with a really awesome image of an autographed football helmet inside a glass display. Really nice job! I don’t feel so bad myself, because I managed to get six votes. That means at least someone out there thought it was good! And I’m only a beginner… The mor...

Something I’ve been really enjoying about PhotoWorks is being able to save your own appearances, those you have modified from pre-existing ones, and then use them in a totally different project. I had a bit of fun altering the colors in one of the marble appearances available in PhotoWorks to create my own funky looking ones. It all starts in the render manager, by right clicking on the appearan...

No, I don’t mean vote for the next president of the United States, but for your favorite image in October’s PhotoWorks Rendering contest at Rob Rodriguez Blog. Go and cast your vote today!  I submitted an image myself; can you guess which one is mine? The image for the next contest is Ricky Jordan’s Mach 4 Racer, so make sure to download the model and start working on it!   ...

If there’s one thing I’m learning is that, for the most part, it takes a good model to produce a good rendered image. Even with the greatest appearances and scenes, if your model’s features look out of proportion or have oddly sharp edges were there should be smooth transitions, then the rendering is not going to look very realistic. As an example, take a look at this model of a soda can tha...

Earlier, this afternoon, I submitted what will be my entry for the 32nd Rendering Contest, hosted by Rob Rodriguez.  I wish I could tell you which entry is mine, but that would be against the rules, so you’ll have to wait until after the winner is announced to find out.  This is very exciting for me! It’s the first time I ever enter a contest like this one and even more exciting is the fact ...

If you’ve ever attempted to layout a tile floor at home or create a garment out of a piece of plaid fabric, then you may have an idea of what editing and mapping textures in PhotoWorks feels like, and, especially in the case of the garment, how difficult it is at times to make the plaid pattern match exactly at the seams. You usually need extra fabric for that! Lucky for us, in PhotoWorks we don...

My first render ever was made in PhotoView 360. That was also the day I fell in love with rendering applications, because seeing how good that rendered image looked like made me feel that I could also be a creative (even artistic) person after all. This is big news if you are like me and grew up with a sister that could draw incredibly realistic images with her hands by the time she was nine years...