The majority of these pieces are by no means finished works. This is my version of a sketch book, I sketch with 3D models. Then I can create a sequence of images from a very small camera movement. This allows me to view the scene in 3D with a stereo viewer. I do this to check if a perspective will work in an effort to get an interesting 3D scene. Many of these images I've gone on to refine for 2D reproduction as digitally painted inkjet prints. The majority are just concepts or subjects I wanted to explore further.

I have begun to put finishing touches on some of my 3D scenes for reproduction as 3D lenticular Duratrans transparencies. I feel backlighting is the optimal way to display lenticular work since the lens material is very reflective. The process of prepping an image for lenticular printing is a time consuming one. After several hundred hours spent just constructing and lighting a 3D scene you then have to render it. Lenticular imaging demands lots of resolution both in the image and in the printer because of how the interleaving process works. The Durst Lambda is a 360 ppi printer so ideally the original images should be 360 ppi as well. My long dimension would be 20" or 7200 pixels wide or long. Rendering a relatively complex scene at much more than 2000 pixels is not possible within the constraints of my 16Gb of computer memory. Even at that resolution a single frame rendered at 2K can take hours. Multiply that by 9 frames.

Now each frame needs to be upsized to 8K and I accomplish this by utilizing a digital paint synthesizer. The ten rendered frames (after any postwork) are fed into the synthesizer and painted to an 8K canvas. Each image will be painted several different times using different specially selected and modified paint brushes. These 8K layers are combined using the various blending modes in Photoshop to achieve the look I desire. The result can look photographic or with a few tweaks can look like an absstract painting depending on the brush sizes used and how the layers are blended.

The synthesizer has the ability to repeat the same paint steps as used on the first image on each consecutive image. At 8K resolution the brushstrokes are more like film grain (a digital grain). The process seems to minimize aliasing and hides many artifacts. It can give a slight painterly look to images and I feel softens some of the hardshness of digital renderings. These composites are then flattened to create the files for interlacing and printing. This process even while somewhat automated can take several hours per layer.

Both of those rendering steps will tie up my computers for long periods making further new work impossible, I don't like doing it when I could be working on something else but when at a loss for an idea it's fun to watch the synthesizer or the renderer fill the page, sort of like being in the darkroom again. I try to render at night or when I'm away from home for awhile. I may be moving a glacial pace I think I am making some sprogress.