Last update: July, 2022

Around the middle of 2002 I received (via email) a .vfl file of experimental code to test with Houdini 6.0. It was a shader ("Radiant") for radiosity/global illumination-like rendering.

It's probably safe to reveal now that "Radiant" was written by Mark Elendt of Side Effects Software. And, in October of 2002, with Mark's permission, I uploaded the code to Odforce, crediting it to "Anonymous".

I was excited by the look I could get with this shader, especially when compared to ray-traced renderings that were standard at the time. Over the next year I spent most of my spare time creating dozens of images using "Radiant".

It wasn't all "joy", however. The experimental code left random black pixels throughout each image, which led to painstaking hours of manual repairs using a paint program, until my eyeballs burned. (In retrospect, I should have written some code to go through each image and fix those black pixels automatically.)

By early 2004 I was using Houdini 7.0, which included production-quality ambient occlusion rendering, (no more burning eyeballs), and continued working on this series of images until January of 2005.

I always wanted the final output of these images to be large-format prints on fine-art paper, rather than just digital displays or photographic prints.

I also wanted to capture the feel of the stone-lithography prints I used to make at art-school (NSCAD) in 1979 & 1980. To this end, I purposely left in, or even added, some "grain" to the images, in an effort to replicate the texture from stone-litho tablets.

Grain texture detail

My first test of large format printing was in July of 2004 with a respected commercial printing facility in NYC. The tests went poorly and, after several weeks and hundreds of dollars in expenses, I abandoned the commercial printing route.

Later that year, by some great fortune, my designer/photographer friend, Kathy Landman, purchased an "Epson Pro 4000" large format printer and needed a place to install it.

The Epson Pro 4000

I had extra space at my animation studio located on 22nd Street near Fifth Avenue, and was more than happy to let her install it there.

The printer used Ultrachrome archival inks and could handle large sheets or rolls of thick, fine-art paper. After some trial-and-error I was finally able to output the high quality prints I would be happy with.

Still feeling the influence of Robert Rogers, my lithography instructor at NSCAD, (and Printer Fellow at Tamarind Lithography Workshop), I was determined to output limited editions (10 each) of some selected images.

Prints drying, fresh from Epson Pro 4000

However, before leaving NYC (and the glorious Epson Pro 4000) in mid 2005, I was only able to output the "artist's proofs", a few complete editions, and several partial editions.

Below are links to all the "Series" images created from mid-2002 through January 2005.

Below are links to an obsessive amount of edition print details.

Below are links to some additional information.