This is my entry for Blender Artists Weekend Challenge 226 (“one of nature’s mysteries” theme):
The Wave-Particle Duality of Light Rendered in Blender 2.42.
Here are some links with more information about this very interesting phenomenon: 1, 2, 3
Thank you for viewing my work,
RobertT
Trippy, and you really knew what you were going to pick and re-create.
I never even heard of this, could make a good neon display.
Good work.
Wow dude…just…wow!
Very Very Nice!
-Chris
Hi Robert, to be honest this work is unusual for you.
In comparison to your exquisite sculpting models & your intangible abstracts, this is strange, to be polite.
Your normal work is of the highest level that Blender Artists achieve, you are amongst the best of the best, a highly respected, quality artist, first rate in every task.
I feel you let yourself down with this work.
Thanks anyway, nice wire curves.
M.A.
very nice !
Cyborg Dragon: Thanks. The moment I saw the WC topic this was one of the first ideas I had, and I selected it because it would take me into a very different direction in terms of technique and presentation.
magiciandude: Thank you very much for the very nice words, magiciandude.
Meta-Androcto: I appreciate your point of view. The topic and the direction I took necessitated me going in more of a vector approach, with regards to visualization and style, and I welcomed that as it was very different from my other work. Vector work in Blender is something I rarely see, but it’s valid and beautiful, such as macuono’s recent patterns. You mentioned “strange,” but, in reality, nature if far stranger if you’ve seen images of particle physics, etc. online. Some of them are intricate beyond belief, and yet naturally made, nature-rendered art so to speak. All the thinking that goes into any one of my pieces went into this, as well as the effort. Embedded in this piece are all the ideas regarding wave-particle duality of light, the various quantum and viewer aspects of it, the double slit experiment, along with even the Uncertainty Principle. Planning took about a half hour to work out the composition. All in all, this took around 5 hours to complete. I consider it one of my more “important” pieces almost solely on the basis of how unique the idea and challenge to represent it was in the thousands of blends I’ve done over the past few years. That, and this was a WC entry, something I often use often to explore new techniques and ideas independently from my larger works. There is always the danger and the temptation to compare something to past somethings, like this work to past works of mine, but what that does is says each piece does not deserve its own existence, that it should be like the others, that it should conform to a style and methodology in the name of consistence, and that is something I think aspiring artists would do well to maintain an awareness of, because that way lies mediocrity. As artists we really do need room to breathe, grow, adjust, fail and succeed, try very different things and styles, and so on. I could probably limit myself to one range of styles and topics, but that would be turning my back on the universe of expressive possibility that exists out there begging to be explored. It’s not part of my journey I expect people to understand, but it is an essential part that I hope people would respect.
r3615: Thank you very much.
RobertT
Hi Robert, Thank you for your insightful response, the thought you put into each piece is amazing. You are right that exploring new paths and techniques is the way forward for learning and artistic growth.
I guess I was taken by surprise at the style, as I had come to expect “the usual fare”.
I hope you give me many more surprises in the future. I’m sure you will.
Best Wishes, M.A.
Nice to see another great render from you Robert. I can appreciate that although this isn’t the most technically skilled of your works you have still interpreted a complex idea beautifully. Taking influence from real partical images may not be the most original ways of interpreting this but i dont care because of how well you have done anyway.
It is a small pitty you couldnt illustrate the point that light behaves differently depending on how you look at it, as is the same with most aspects of quantum physics because this is some of the reasoning behind light’s strange qualities.
In the future there may be a new method of examining light and other quantum particals and then peole would be discussing the triality of light (if there is such a word).
Meta-Androcto: Thanks so much for understanding. Yes, more surprises are on the way 
TheANIMAL: Thanks for the great feedback. In the lower lefthand corner of the image is an eye (or what may be interpreted as a sensor) that is observing the particle. We know from studies documenting the double-slit experiment that observation alters the outcome, so this is a very important part of this phenomenon and what makes the idea especially intriguing to me 
Quantum entanglement and tunneling is also partly symbolized here with the left/right intersecting elements emanating from the lower corners, which compositionally I associated with the respective “double slits.” At the very least, I hope this image encourages people to peer into this extremely strange world of physics that literally opens up all sorts of possibilities and philosophical questions.
As Niels Bohr said, “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.”
RobertT
Yes, this is very unusual for you. But on the other hand, it is not.
Once again you show us what Blender’s features can achieve, you never stick to something but try to find new paths and techniques, which is amazing. And it’s something that I try to do as well, so I know, results are not always perfectly satisfying
But still, this piece is great. I like the color scheme you’ve used, mainly blue but the slight changes in the shade of blue and the tiny yellow tints make this interesting enough. The shapes are wonderful as well - they are made of dozens of individual “particles” but in the end they look as if they are one. Which is symbolizing the behaviour of light for me.
And obviously, you found a very interesting topic here. Quantum mechanics are just weird and it is quite funny to see and read about the reactions of the physicists who “invented” or “explored” it. Einstein did not believe it, Feynman did not understand it and Schrödinger did not like it - what shall we simple minds believe and think, then?
man did robertt just call his work an interesting phenomenon? wow…this guys got a bigger ego then super wu-man, :yes:
robertt i really like your new “interesting phenomenon”, haha!, the small yellow areas is what make the entire work pull together really nice!
this would look great printed out really huge and hung of the wall, nice stuff man!
Myke: Thank you so much for that great feedback, Myke. I actually taught myself a couple of tricks during this project I may use at some point in my F1 contest entry whenever I get around to starting that
Super Wu-Man: Haha, thanks for feedback and the good laugh! Of course I was really referring to the phenomenon of the duality of light, lol What was weird about this project is that I was doing test renders at higher resolution, and I figured I just might resize the final large render in PS for web viewing, but the smoothing that happened (even with Bilinear sharper in PS) was too much. For OSA in Blender I deliberately went with CatRom for sharpness. So I wound up re-rendering in Blender for the final web render. I’m still toying with the possibility of prints with my other projects, so we’ll see.
RobertT
Have you ever considered selling huge prints of these works at all. Theoretically with the quality of your work you could sell millions and then you can donate a large chunk to the Blender Foundation to speed up development.