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"Late Afternoon" is perhaps my first mature artwork. It appeared in the SIGGRAPH '88 art show. The palette for "Late Afternoon" was borrowed from the Hudson River School of American landscape painters. While I still love the subtlety of color in this rendering, the later sketches of the same scene (see below) offer greater self-expression for me, as an artist. That is to say, they better convey the mood I intended to capture.
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My friend Dan Pinkham, a successful impressionistic open-air landscape painter gave me coaching on maximizing temperature contrast between sunlit and shadowed areas. I applied this to "Late Afternoon" to get this moody rendition.
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After regarding the "Cool Afternoon" rendering for a spell, I determined to try pushing the temperature contrast still further, to match certain rare moments I've observed in Nature. "Cool Afternoon II" is the result.
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Dan encouraged me to push the temperature contrast further still. In "Cool Afternoon III," pursuit of expression of a certain mood takes us perhaps beyond what we might find in Nature.
Another aspect of the evolution of the palette used in the series of renderings of "Cool Afternoon" is my own growing confidence as an artist, as I perceive a style beginning to emerge in my own works. When I first rendered "Late Afternoon" I was aware of my own ignorance of color usage in landscape rendering; thus I stole my palette from the masters of the Hudson River school.
I have since realized that those masters may have been constrained by the gamut of colors in the paints available to them (which have inevitably yellowed over the years, as well). A wondrous thing about the computer monitor is it's large color gamut. We can produce colors beyond what a painter can invoke.
I am of the opinion that computer artists often abuse this splendid gamut, by always working around the fringes of available saturation, but that's just one man's opinion. I generally try to keep my own renderings within palette of colors found in Nature. But then, we all have our lapses, and I notice that with time I'm moving more and more towards saturated colors and high contrast in my renderings.
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In 1989 I was commissioned by IBM to create a series of images for the "Think" exhibit which was in place for approximately five years in the gallery of IBM's office building in Manhattan. The series was designed to be faded from one to the next in a video animation. The idea was to show how mathematical abstraction moves towards realistic description of the world we live in. This first image illustrates how I first view a landscape model, long before a final, fully-realistic rendering.
The aspect ratio of these images is a little squashed, because they were designed to be viewed on six mosaicked NTSC television monitors.
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The next image in the series shows the terrain model as a linearly-interpolated surface rendered with hidden-surface removal and two directional light sources.
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The third image adds shadows and some surface textures for realistic coloration, illuminated with two plain white light sources. The standard ray-tracing features of shadows and reflection are included.
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The fourth and final image illustrates the importance of environmental subtleties such as atmospheric haze, clouds, bump-mapped waves on the water, and artful use of light-source colors.
Last Change: August 21, 1996