Hamburgers are nothing but biotransformed grass. Think about that.

I am sketching my next idea up with some kind of forest-y fantasy scene. I wanted to have some pastelcore super saturated vibrancy as appposed to the last piece with a more natural setting. You know, if you were to use an AI image generator you end up with overly synthetic and cartoony looking beautification. That is what I am thinking of. I am not sure if it will be exactly that yet, but I am visuallizing something like that. I try to keep my images varied and testing different things out. I never really understood the whole schtick with repeating the same thing over and over again (and I have gotten in trouble for pointing that out aswell), so I'll just keep trying all sorts of stuff out in the random fashion that I do. And you can come along if you like!

Back when I was a newly minted (idiot) artist in the world three dimensions, I didn't have any GPU rendering option. GPUs were for gaming that I opted out for when building my new computer for creative works and the vast majority of higher end cards were either scalped en masse and/or used for hosting the dumbest idea on the planet and creating a market for a whole bunch of fugly looking ape pictures. Thanks to web3 and blockchain bro wasting ridiculous amounts of energy and killing the planet faster than even before  - you too can spend $20000 on an ugly *** ape picture to call your own. A flex worhty of true legends. A market that since then pretty much vanished. Even though the idea was so dumb from the get go by pretending something that can be endlessly duplicated is somehow uniquely scarce because a simulation of scarcity can make money if enough suckers are fooled into beliving this would be teh futare we are heading towards. The possibilities - man.

Anyway. 

All was CPU rendered and sooooooo slow. I will give you an idea how long time a complex scene with dozens of light sources and high quality shadows (AO) with additional 32x AA per pixel noise processing takes for an 4k image. I could start a render on friday afternoon and barely finish on sunday evening. Sometimes it was even worse than that, so I decided to cancel it and just let it be an unrendered scene that would never be on display. What is even worse about rendering art is that you are not entirely sure what the end result will look like unless you actually render it out and look at it. Move an object or light source and - yep, another render to see what THAT looks like.
So I figured I needed something that would speed this process up. Let's get one of those RTX things.

Buying a high end GPU in the middle of a panda-mix and with above mentioned scalping crypto nonsense was not easy. Nor was it cheap, shall we say. It was almost impossible to source a GPU at all, let alone the type of card neeed for the job.
One would think paying that much for a hunk of electronics with fans was a bad economic decision, but it turned out the prices would really never drop over the years for these kinds of cards. 
In fact, it seems they are getting even more expensive for each generation. So I guess it didn't matter when or how. It just needed to happen.
 
Over time as I discovered a whole slew of quriks and bugs with having a separate rendering engine, this summer I found what I didn't even know I was looking for in the form of a little standalone application that does what I wanted from the very beginning. 
It is as close to real time ray tracing engine you can get (unless you go absolutely bananas) and I LOVE IT.
The full power of the GPU finally  made sense. It is quite the beast at pushing them pixels when it gets the chance of doing it. This is what it was designed for. Not 200+ FPS in Roblox or whatever.
It only took 3 years to get there. Cries in sunk cost.
Soon there will be a 5090 RTX on the market and I have yet to create taxing enough scenes for my card to start seeing its limitations.

Where am I going with this teal dear monstrosity? Uh.. I am not sure. A slice of computer life.. maybe.

Art. Weekend. Soon.