HOSJ: Thanks. The theme was very difficult, but hopefully we’ll see some more entries.
Basse: Okay, I definitely saw this reaction coming 
although not from you I would have thought 
(especially since you had liked my nudedescendingadimension render from a while back…) As always, I deeply respect your opinions, so I’d like to explain a little more about what I tried to do here. To show what the scene looks like at an angle, I posted a wireframe above. I actually didn’t do this through textures (only 1 cloud texture was used to slightly vary color but that’s it). It’s all geometry here: there were over 800k verts, since I used 3D (not 2D) bevelled Bezier curves, which resulted in a complex interwoven thing that, when looked at through the camera, somewhat resembled overlapping paint strokes of varying thickness. Here I used the depth factor to control the perceived flow of paint and to avoid the more scribbly look that would occur if only 2d curves were used. The whole thing took almost an hour to render.
For this wc we were asked to recreate or personalize “a famous painting” (Igor also used the word “ancient” but then qualified it to include works up through 20th century). Just as when working in 2D I am sometimes fascinated with trying to attain 3D, it’s occasionally the same the other way around, to get away sometimes from traditional looking 3D renders, if only just to do something different. This particular WC theme of “paintings” set up this kind of situation, although GIMP is probably a much better program to do this sort of stuff in - but for the wc that’s not really possible 
That said, I really do enjoy making Blender do stuff that challenge expectations of what a program can or should do
Among several paintings I considered (including more 3Dish ones, including one by Botticelli which I started yesterday but set aside when it started to resemble more of a sculpture than the “painting” anticipated by the wc theme – hence my “possibly” comment in my first post), CONVERGENCE seemed like a formidable challenge to attempt, especially refreshing where there was an opportunity to go Pollockesque to a certain extent, as raw and random and physical as creations can get in 3D, it seemed, espeically with the free flowing and arbitrary drafting and shaping of Bezier curves. Pollock’s “I can control the flow” comment was in my head And while there’s no real depth, other than thickness of paint, in the original abstract painting (Pollock using his famous paint drip method for it), a “fly through” could be interesting were it not for the render time.
On another note, at some point while attempting to do this, I understood and appreciated even more the rawness and energy of Pollock’s action painting method, and as I had learned before, it’s one thing to look at this sort of work as a spectator and another thing completely to physically create. It’s a very physical style, fiercely free yet not completely without thought. And I’ll admit it was fun too
RobertT
