I just got the LightWave 3D 8.0 box, UPS delivered it to the door. The box is bigger than the old ones - I like it. The manual and the CD-covers are a lot better on this version too. Good work NewTek. Time to update my old 7.5...

I'm currently evaluating The Maxwell Renderer (v1.2 beta) and Worley's FPrime (v1.5) and both of these rendering technologies are truly amazing. I'm really not sure which one to buy. Maxwell has the most realistic lighting algorithms that I have ever seen and Fprime renders 20-50 times faster than any other rendering engine on the planet. So I'll either buy the v1.2 beta of Maxwell for half the price OR I'll wait for the next version of Fprime v2.0 to be released. Apparently that should be very soon.

I tested a lot of my old LightWave 3D scenes in Fprime yesterday and I cranked up the settings and quality on all of them, since they pretty much rendered in realtime with radiosity (jaw-dropping stuff, believe-you-me). In the below link you can see a scene that I did about 2.5 years ago in LightWave 3D but I never finished it; since it took too long to test-render it during the lighting setup of the scene. This JPEG is rendered in HD-DVD resolution at 1920 x 1080 with 63 passes from Fprime and my guess is that this rendering would take about 7-10 days for my (very fast) workstation to render with LightWave 3D's standard renderer. Fprime did it in around 8-9 hours. :) (Note: I'll post some Maxwell images here later too.)



Technorati tag(s): Maxwellrender, Fprime, 3D, Maya Lightwave3D, Lightwave, Rendering, Graphics

My friend Anders has finally put up his vlog. I luv it - go check out it:


the random show

I have decided to upgrade my LightWave-suite up to version 8.0. I already have four LW-boxes in my shelf next to me, but NewTek has a really nice deal (which ends on June 30th) that I can't skip. The price is half-off and the new upgrade comes with a bunch of CDs, a new big 8.0 box and a real thick manual (no PDF-stuff here). There's a lot of 3D softwares out there today and most of the creators are really lowering their prices now (are they desperate?) - which is good for us, the users.

Eventhough I've mostly used Maya since early spring 1998 LightWave will always have a special place in my heart. It's a superb software and a lot of pro tools for the money!

There's really no need for me to upgrade my Maya-suite to the latest one; version 4.5 with mental ray covers my needs at ILS and I use the latest version at work all day long anyway. Besides, upgrading it to version 6.5 would cost me something like 14000 swedish crowns and that's too much money.

On another note, it was great to see that I'm still featured in the official LightWave 3D gallery at Newtek.com. My image has had 3484 views at the moment and you can find this old thing here. The gallery is a lot bigger now, it has 1203 images but when NewTek added mine it was number 39. :)

To read more about LW version 8.0 (8.3) click this link.

I did a logo and temporary website for my EVE corporation NextGen last night. I think that it turned out pretty good. Go check it out.

I'm thinking about buying a T-Rex 450 XL (by Align)... Check out these two videos. These are some of the best pro pilots out there.


REX demo by Flytech | Accurate 3D with the Rex

The Battlefield 2 demo has finally been released. Repi gave me a tip and I was one of the few lucky ones that managed to start downloading it just seconds after it came up online on Gamespot.com. The servers were filled within minutes; it was pretty crazy... You can find the demo here.

I'll see you all in the battlefields... My alias is "Nocturnal" (as always).

Wow, this is pretty impressive. Wanna get a taste of OSX Tiger from your PC? This dude made an OSX Tiger simulater as a website. It's not 100%, but you get a little feel of the system here...

Go check it out at: FlyakiteOSX

Steve Jobs did a wonderful introduction to this years WWDC. You have to see this one. It's about 60 minutes long and the Mac + Intel rumour is apparently true. 'Very interesting.

Stream it HERE.

Speaking of websites - I really, REALLY, need to do a 2005-update on my (now famous) website RINGU FAN. I haven't touched it in a long time now, eventhough I'm still a big Ringu fan. I started creating a version 4.0 of the site last year but I din't finish it. It has a menu-system and is diviced into 5-6 different pages instead of having everything on the same page. A lot of people who signed my Guestbook still thinks that this layout still is cool though. Back in 2001-2002 when I created it I just made it for fun as a "one-scroll-website" and had no idea that it would be this big and get so many hits.

I'd also like to apologize to a few people that signed my guestbook and had questions. I try to reply all of you, but I'm afraid that I've probably missed some threads during the last year or so. Thank you all for your kind words anyway. I'm really glad that the site is so popular and that it's also linked and quoted from so many different places these days. I find my website and name linked in the most weird places/forums in the world. That's pretty cool.

Version 14.0 of my private site (Est. 1995) is, well...this. There's really no reason for me to do yet another personal site with a gallery, a resumé, a demo reel etc. I have too much contents these days for it to be worth all the trouble. So from now on this blog "arvid.online" is my main site and you can find all my galleries in the links on this site. My main site arvid.intelligent-light.com will just be a portal to this blog.

I will be posting more images in my galleries on Pbase.com soon; I'll have a lot more free time during my vacation in about a week. If you want to see more 3D images and/or my "reel" - do check out my MovieFolio in the links to the right. I'll post an updated resumé here soon too.