I want to make it clear before we begin that I started the three day weekend by putting my knee through the screen of my Amazon HD Fire 10″ tablet.
An unnamed kitten had moved it under my blankets on my bed and I literally went into my bedroom and onto my bed going “Where did I put my — CRUNCH!”
The tablet was a gift from co-workers who felt badly after I had been laid off last year so I feel awful about it. It meant, and still means a lot that they gifted me something to say goodbye and, of course, (like all my recent tablets) it lasted about a year before going to tablet heaven.
Ironic that I don’t believe in human heaven, but I believe in a great electronics heaven in the sky.
So. Space.
Space looks beautiful with the new rendering software.
Mind you, I had to abandon my old scene completely as it was a video of a nebula projected on a plane behind the spaceship and replace it with a free floating video of a nebula in the background behind the ship.
The old way didn’t work because when using iRay rendering *everything* casts a shadow. So by putting something physical in the scene (a video plane), the ship casts a huge shadow that ruins the shot. The background video isn’t “real” so it doesn’t cast a shadow but, alas, it tends to resize itself to fit any aspect ratio you may choose for your capture (since it’s not confined) and thus, any shot I ever do of this nebula is going to be 1080p for continuity’s sake.
Looks beautiful but is a pain in the ass. Story of my life.
Also a pain in the ass, dark scenes. Artifacting. Mumble grumble.
The long story short: I’m experiencing artifacting in low light scenes. In the above picture you can see how speckled the character’s face is.
The work around is to take each image into Photoshop and apply a simple despeckle filter. It smooths the image out and stops people from asking, “What the hell is wrong with her face?”
I don’t like the fix. I don’t have time to fix it for one scene that I’ll probably never come back to. So I’m going to live with it and bitch about it forever.
On that note, the remastered remaster of issue 01 will probably be up this week. I’m working on an “issue 00” prologue that will be up before that if all goes well.
Stay tuned.
–Jim