It seems as if the summer is just flying by faster than usual.  I had a pretty solid week in terms of production outside of the freelance work I have been finishing up. As I am typing, I have the render going for the shot from episode 1. I had some issues with the bump map and anti-aliasing taking too long to render so I had to reduce the bump map to get it down to a reasonable size to render.

For those of you that don’t know what a bump map is, it is basically a gray scale texture that makes things appear 3D. So you can have a flat plane and apply a bump map to it to make the plane look like a brick without having to go into the plane and make all sorts of little imperfections.

*The above image is what the flat letters look like without any texture. 
*The bump map allows the texture on the letters to look like it has a metal texture to it. All of it is done with an image and I didn’t have to effect the letter fronts.

The render is the last thing that needs to be created for this shot, so once the render is done it will be some minor compositing work. I spent a little more time on tweaking the render settings to get it down in render time that I didn’t get a chance to touch the ocean shots I talked about last week.

I did however, get a chance to scan in the artwork for the prologue and get it inked. I just need to color and shade one piece and get them dropped into the prologue. I also have the audio downloaded, so that is another priority for this upcoming week.

Over the next few days, I have a couple freelance projects that should be starting up, but as they get started I will have some time to get more artwork done.

I also aim to start posting imagery to the Cosmic Rage Facebook page with some behind the scenes content. The reason I can’t do those kinds of things on this blog is because as of now it is a free blog so my space is limited for posting up new pictures. I don’t know how long the blog will exist on WordPress until it moves to a new home. I plan on having an interactive website which will also allow for a better viewing experience of the episodes once they are completed. Stay Tuned for more!