Spotted Greeble a few weeks back. A great free pluggin for 3dsMax written by Tom Hudson. Basically, take a model add the pluggin… instant death star. Genius.

I am a big fan of impressionist landscape painting (Monet, Cezanne etc) and came across the artist Sean McMills while browsing the internet and was blown away by it.

A California based painter, Sean paints almost exclusively plein air (painting done while outside) landscapes around California. Sean makes painting look so easy, the colour in his work is stunning and it amazes me the way he can capture a scene with the bare minimum of brush strokes.

I’d highly recommend looking at some of his artwork.

This is nuts, a picture from the Maxwell renderer. I looked and thought it was the photo reference for a 3d model but no this is the render. This looks so real its impossible to tell what is 3d and what is real life anymore.

Then I ask myself “what’s the point ?”. Rendering and 3d artists at the moment seem utterly obsessed with how “realistic” things look, the whole goal seems to be to just create images which look like photos. The image there even features a feature for putting camera flash lighting into the scene ?!?! What ! If this was a photo you’d say yuk it looks horrible, it just looks like a cheap snapshot.