NEW! Novica & Invited Guest Contributors Tips & Product Reviews Pt 5
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Small print just said Gift Cards excluded (shame! :) ) - thanks for bravely testing the one-use theory, I had wondered that too, now I know to stack as much as I can afford into the cart i one go (shame there probably won't be a PA Festival Catch-up before Friday 26th)
I am going to pick up Antfarm's flak vest. I like all police gear, (at least the realistic stuff), plus you can customize it which is a great option.
I really like EArkham's ZWorld Broken Road as well. Nice looking ground, and great cactus. Looks very nice.
They are sitting in my cart. I'll probably buy later in the day once I make sure I haven't missed anything.
There should be a vendor catch-up tomorrow - their back catalogue, not new items. If past weeks are anything to go by.
If people are PC+ and got that code for another 10% and were at the 30%, they'd be cleaning up. :)
I got flak jacket, deepwater, and the road with my 10% plus 20% punch, and the diner car, so I'm pretty much done. I'm doing mostly sets. Do not need anymore characters.
Part of the bundle featured on the New Releases page (upper right corner) but I don't like the outfit and don't need the poses.
http://www.daz3d.com/atticus-warrior-bundle is $47.95- no way.
Way. Not sure what discounts are supposed to apply, if any. If you have your targeted discount code, I think you can use it? This will be $15 or less depending on what discounts apply. As usual, I am not checking out until tomorrow afternoon. I am getting the 51% off at the moment.
http://www.daz3d.com/drifter-hair-for-genesis-2-males
http://www.daz3d.com/atticus-for-gianni-6
There should be a vendor catch-up tomorrow - their back catalogue, not new items. If past weeks are anything to go by.
Yes indeed - for this week's PA's - unfortunately I'd really like some stuff from Weeks 1 and 2 that I couldn't grab before... ah well!
I really think this is a glitch. First off, the newsletter for today shows 30% off (attached pic) and all the content is DO so I'm certain the bundle ought to be too, so that's 51% right there. Then it should work with the 10% extra code or with the (apparently released a bit early) $$ rewards coupons.
I'm kind of bummed the men's content isn't eligible for a punch. I haven't made even tier one for two weeks. Yeah, I know, stop whining, but I'd like to have the extra percentage and the coupon. =-)
I do like the hair and the figure. I don't tend to render fantasy images so don't need more barbarian/conan style outfits. I have enough I have never used.
I picked up the poses. Dual wield is interesting, and useful for different types of weapons.
I also picked up the Protohive by Orestes Graphics. This is an interesting little location with 3 textures. And if you have rock shaders you can make your own caves, and hide elements like the ribs to give it a more natural cave look.
If you haven't noticed the double punches for today, go to New Releases and check the banner. You will get the double punches at 4pm today.
Exciting Opportunity!
I am thrilled to announce that I will be hosting a guest author on the thread this Friday, 7pm Central Time. (EDIT: MOVED TO 8PM) R. Scot Johns from Fantasy Castle Books (go to the dot com) will be live on the thread at that time to answer your questions about ebook publishing. I personally have his book, "How To Make Kindle Comics and Graphic Novels" (A Step By Step Guide) and it is SO detailed and concise that I asked Scot if he would do us the honor of answering questions about publishing with Amazon, using DAZ products in his eBooks, and marketing strategies. He has shared some of his renders with me and we've been corresponding and I thought, "Gosh, this is a shame to keep all this good stuff to myself," so I am tickled that you can have access to this very generous man who has steered me straight for eBook publishing.
One thing about Scot's book is the access to templates (yes, ready to go!) for your ebooks. They are a companion to his book and very thorough. From the FantasyCastleBooks site, the book is described as, ""How to Make Kindle Comics & Graphic Novels" by R. Scot Johns, featuring 18 pages of sample content for use in creating fixed layout illustrated ebooks for the Kindle. Spanning the gamut from simple, image-only pages to complex interactive layers, it demonstrates with practical examples every aspect of Kindle fixed layout code, from live text overlays to image and text zoom functions, with many unique examples of their use."
Scot's other books include "The Saga of Beowulf" series, "Theft of the Rhinegold" (Part 1 of The Ring Saga).
Scot has been a big help regarding fixed format and the KF8 formatting. Obviously, being DAZ and Poser users, we want to have images in our books and covers, and Scot has been a big help.
I want you to see something cool- look at this promo- the very end, the boat sails into the cover! Scot does Photoshop, is a Poser user, and you can ask him about his animation work too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KerYlFxk_yM#t=23
I'm excited and motivated. :)
Update: I am moving that to 8PM this Friday because that will give Scot more time to get home from work.
For Scot: Questions
what I would like to know or see discussed... (and others can weigh in on this, FRIDAY 8pm. Please wait until then to discuss how you do it or what you've heard.
1.) How many, if any, interior images do you have in your books?
2.) Kindle: Is there a size you recommend for interior images?
3.) Kindle: What is the most recent guidelines for file size for interior images?
4.) Kindle: Cover- recommended file size
5.) Marketing strategies. Smashwords is pretty adamant about not limiting sales to Amazon, but for exposure (particularly for a series and just getting started) the option of providing it to Prime members and getting paid for downloads (while exclusive to Amazon) seems like a decent strategy.
6.) Other marketing strategies
7.) How ebooks have changed and particularly the fixed format options
8.) Words of wisdom about Calibre and Sigil
9.) KindleGen issues
10. My biggie- One thing that I've read conflicting details about- how to handle text with images. Should it be done with css (cascading style sheets which is coding that places things, styles the page) or should the image be done in Photoshop
11.) Fonts- embedding. Recommended fonts for Kindle
12.) Any advice on ipad/iphone publications?
I
This is exciting news indeed, Novica. Thanks to both you and Scot for your time and effort to make this happen. I've never considered making a graphic novel / comic, I'm not sure I currently have the skills for such an undertaking, but I will follow the discussion with interest. In any case, I'll pick up something useful for making ebook covers.
I haven't been around as much as I'd like, so apologies if I'm behind the times, but does this mean you have a graphic novel of your own ready to publish?
Hi Jindi :)
Not a problem about "not being around." I've been working on my book so that's why I haven't been either. I said the beginning of summer that come this fall, I would have to start prioritizing using the products for a book and MAKING some money or at least justifying my expenditures, lol.
Just like when I started DAZ and documented my trials and errors, I thought it might be encouraging for folks who haven't taken the plunge to get some "on target" advice and not have to spend the THREE WEEKS that I did researching. It was painful. Stuff is out of date and contradicts each other all over the place. You CAN do fixed format (as opposed to flowable, which can be a problem with text and images moving around) in a Kindle. You can, however, use good CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and that tells paragraphs and images what to do. Scot's book has links to the templates that has it DONE FOR YOU for the most part. Sigh. Where was he three weeks ago? (Grin- not his fault. I went through hundreds of sites and books on Amazon, bought several.)
So I am only on Chapter 2 of mine, SeaNautica is IN the series but not THE series- only one of the many fun things that the characters will have to encounter and deal with. Before I went too deep into the renders, I needed to find out how many I could use, how big they needed to be, and not waste my time doing renders that would take me over the file size for the interior of the book. I also looked up all the print options, and have had help behind the scenes with people who have done print and digital. So if you've not considered doing an ebook, now might be the time to jump in as I can personally say I just started from scratch looking things up and I can jump you ahead by getting to the good info.
I also changed the reader level to go down to middle grade. With the type of trouble the characters get into, kids will really get the giggles.
Scot is amazing. He emailed me right back when I had trouble with my zip program opening the files. I mean, that's not HIS problem. He stayed right on top of it until I just trialed and errored it (lol, errored got underlined, I am a BAD girl for using a word that doesn't exist. I like errored and am defiantly leaving it!)
One thing I did that I am glad for- but keep in mind, I am just now moving forward- when I had trouble with my zip program (7zip) I found that I could extract it into DreamWeaver. Because I have the CS6 of Photoshop, I qualified for the $30 Creative Cloud (instead of $50) which includes the latest updates to Photoshop (not a biggie) but also DREAMWEAVER and I was using Hotdog years ago to do my websites. The templates opened easily into DreamWeaver and I am ready to go as it's already in an html editor.
If you're going to do a book, I suggest:
1. a website if you're serious about generating sales. It's how I found Scot. One site for the book series, one site for your author name/pen name.
2. you need a Twitter feed (in your author name/pen name)
3. you need a Facebook page (in your author name)
4. you need a pen name if your name is hard to spell or forgettable. (My maiden name was Brown. OMGosh. I'm SURE there were NO other Cathy/Cathie Browns in this world.) (Sarcasm.)
5. recommended you have someone you trust (who will keep the contents confidential) to read your book and give you an honest first impression.
6. get a YouTube account under your author email and do the promos with that. The program I used to put together my tutorials is Camtasia. AWESOME. I can even do animations in it if I want to do it the old fashioned way and do frame by frame with split second timing. I played with that just for fun. (You can make your character blink, for example.) If you haven't seen Scot's video that I previously linked, take a peek at what HE did. He has a boat that sails into the cover!
What I'm really interested in (and researched) was the marketing so far as going just with Amazon or spreading the wealth. THAT's a fun topic. Because mine is going to be a series, my first book might be the downloadable and I get a fee for that (Prime members download for free- gives you vast exposure) and then I would have the second book ready and available and use that for the lead in. I'll have to see if you do the Prime thing per book or not- the second one I'd like to just have a set price. But I'm still open to ideas.
Several folks have PM'd me that they are going to be asleep, that it's the middle of the night across the pond.If you want to post questions before Friday, that's okay. I'll post some in a little while to help things along. If you aren't on the thread Friday night, I'll be the "moderator" and make sure your question is explored thoroughly- but I can tell you now that won't be a problem. Scot must have been a teacher in a previous life.
Also, you other published authors, please feel free to join in and help guide the discussion along, give your input and share your experiences.
So Jindi, don't worry about HTML and CSS if you haven't done it, the templates for the ebook are good. EIGHTEEN of them, and they build off each other so you can choose which level of difficulty you need. Scot tells you what goes where and why. And there are free website templates too.
Scot is going to come on the thread shortly and post an intro. He works during the day but since folks overseas are on a different schedule, I wouldn't mind if anyone wants to post questions for him while he's available. Just keep in mind he'll be off and on (offline during the day) for the most part, and definitely here Friday night.
Cathie
This sounds fantastic, As I know there are others on the form that have published comics and books. I myself am not the writer type, as even gramor escapes me. Something I've struggled with my entire life. I prefer pics and diagrams over paragraphs, even simple charts and graphs are more my forte, lol.
The most I've done the past few years, is extremely technical overviews of electronic projects, and the quarterly training schedule for the Local ARES grope. When I started a few years back making the schedule, the only two ways I knew how to make a good looking chart, was with HTML using "Nvu" web page editor, or Lotus 123 for DOS (Old-school Spread sheet program).
Open Office was suggested in another forum, as a secondary spell-checker for me, and I have become somewhat proficient in using it to make simple schedule graphs and exporting them to PDF to send out to ARES members.
Admittedly, I know next to nothing about the "Electronic Clipboards" I see others reading books on. How difficult is it to imbed graphs and charts of text for use on something like the Kendall(sp?), or is it still easier to just put a piece of paper on the screen and pull out the ruler and mechanical pencil? Yes I am that old-school when it comes to designing stuff, not quite working with a napkin and pencil on my knee, lol.
(EDIT)
Images form Star Trek. lol.
For those who have NEVER done html or css, inserting tables and graphics would be a puzzle. But it's not intimidating if you get sample code because you can insert your own data.
Let me give you a quick idea of some simple stuff.
To start a paragraph, it's just a < p > (without the spaces) and when the paragraph ends, it's </ p > (no spaces.) That simple.
When you have a table, you have rows and columns. The code will set that up for you- you just use a table generator (or use code that is provided) and it will say, "how many rows?" and "how many columns?" (rows go across, columns are your ups and downs.)
Then it will ask how much padding you want between the the cells (textboxes where your information is.)
Think of that as being on your html page. On that page you can decide if it goes left, right, or middle. OR
On your CSS (cascading style sheet) you can put an identifier (let's do T for table) and tell it that all tables will go right, left, or center.
People wonder why CSS is used. Let's say you have 20 pages and decide to change the text font. Instead of going through each page or paragraph and changing the code, you do it on one page (the CSS page) and voila, it changes across the board. This will be very useful in case the Kindle can take a different font than the Apple system, etc.
So you could do tables easily. :)
That's cool, as I imagine it is like the other stuff I use. I just click the table thing up top, select the column/row numbers, and presto.
My only other question has to do with pics, or specifically diagrams that look best at there native resolution rather then some blurred resizing? For example the attached portion of a schematic, that has already been made about as small as possible, probably to small, however.
With printed books smudged illegible diagrams was almost never an issue (except when the press got out of wack), with digital displays almost everyone seams to have there own version of image bluing that renders allot of diagrams useless. Is there a good workaround for that?
Hello everyone.
Just wanted to drop in and give a quick introduction before Friday night's scheduled event, since most of you probably don't know me. Although I've been an active patron of DAZ since 2009, I have remarkably never wandered into the forums. This is an inevitable result of my strong sense of self-dependence and desire to do things on my own. Undoubtedly I would have learned much quicker had I come here first, but I've also learned things I probably would not have otherwise. Problem solving, for example, is among the greatest skill sets you can have in any endeavor. This applies particularly to ebook production, as you will quickly learn should you pursue that heady task.
As an illustration of my willful independence, and as a round-about way of explaining my introduction to digital art, I self-published my first novel - the 640-page epic adventure The Saga of Beowulf in late 2008, having first taught myself Old English in order to read the poem on which it is based in its original language, after which I researched, wrote, and edited the manuscript, did all the page layouts for print, painted my first ever piece of digital art (2D using Corel Painter and a Wacom tablet) for the cover, learned ebook formatting in order to produce the digital edition in ePub and Kindle formats, built a website from scratch (learning Dreamweaver in the process), created bookmarks, business cards, flyers, a Flash video (learning that program in the process as well), purchased my own block of ISBN numbers and started my own Publishing house (Fantasy Castle Books) in order to deal directly with Ingram's print-on-demand division (Lightning Source), sent out review copies, did interviews and guest appearances on blogs, and started my own blog to detail the trials and tribulations of this adventure into publishing. All this done by myself with no outside assistance: I hired no editor, no cover artist, no PR firm or marketing manager, and I sold over 5000 copies in two years.
Now, to get to the art part is this explanation, I mentioned that I did my own cover as a digital painting. While I felt it turned out fairly well overall, I was never happy with the characters, mainly because I made the grave mistake of saving them till last, by which time I was burned out after working almost ten years on this one book, and very pressed for time with the publication date looming. Lesson learned: always put your people first! I have since gone back and replaced those figures with digital renders, but at the time I had yet to learn about DAZ or Poser: programs like Lightwave were thousands of dollars and well out of the hands of the average mortal.
But during preparation for the marketing phase of the book campaign, a friend sent me an image he had made after having read the manuscript, and I loved it so much that I asked if I could use it in the promotional materials for the book tour. He agreed, but only if he could do a better version, and for that he needed some additional models that were Viking-themed. So I set up my account at DAZ and purchased the Viking Pack, along with the Norse Villager and Saxon expansion packs. This was way back in the days of Michael 2! I think M3 was out, but this was all that was available at the time for costuming a Viking scene. So I bought my first digital models before I ever intended to use them!
You can see both the original image he sent me, as well as a sequence of renders leading to the final art (which I later used as the cover for Part One of the two-volume second edition, which I've added as an attachment below), as well as the process of creation for several other renders I later did for that edition. Unfortunately, most of my art is not currently up on the website, as I've been undertaking a major remodel in preparation for launching my upcoming 4-volume illustrated Ring Saga series. I'll post some renders from it on Friday night though, so you can see what I'm doing at the moment. For now, check out the website archives, where there is a wealth of fun in store hidden in the nooks and crannies of the bookshelves.
So this was my introduction to 3D rendering and I've never looked back. I've been honing and refining my skills ever since, buying models almost weekly, so that I now have an archive of well over 10,000 products, mainly for Poser, since that became my software of choice. I have recently started to work in DAZ again (having started on it first), due primarily to the quality and flexibility of the Genesis platform. My runtime has become a behemoth, and I have developed my own highly categorized method of organizing my content, both within the runtime, using PZdB as a database, and by creating a virtual movie studio portfolio using a folder structure based on the various departments of props, costumes, hair, landscapes, sets, etc.
As for ebook production, which is the primary topic of our upcoming Friday night chat, I will reserve my answers to Novica's questions until then. But a short intro to this discussion might be in order here as well.
Having been introduced to the wonders of render art, I almost immediately decided that my next book would be fully illustrated, and 3D art provided the means. I had originally intended that my Beowulf adaptation should be an illustrated book, since I have loved both art and stories since my childhood. But as the novel grew it became obvious that the cost of adding artwork - even black and white illustrations - would be prohibitive. I did include one pen and ink and a map, but other than the cover, those were my only concessions to my original intention. The next book would be color inside and out, and both ebooks and print on demand would make that possible.
However, creating fully illustrated ebooks turned out to be a much bigger challenge than anticipated, as all digital publishers have discovered. So that led to a nearly two-year delay in which I learned the vagaries of fixed layout formatting, discovering enough about the code that no one else seemed to understand that I wrote an entire book on the subject: How To Make Kindle Comics & Children's Books. My blog has become a mecca for those seeking to learn the ins and outs of illustrated ebook production, and a Google search for "Kindle fixed layout formatting" will usually have me in the top half of the page. My "iBooks formatting tutorial" is ranked even higher.
So for those of you who are interested in making illustrated ebooks, or have already set out on the road and are looking for more information on the subject, I'm here to help. I've learned to do things with the Kindle code that even Amazon doesn't know can be done, and I explain exactly how in my book. But even better, I show you how with two pre-made templates that you can download from my website: one for "simple" image-only ebooks, and the other for more "advanced" content containing text and image overlays, interactive text and image pop-ups, panel view for comics, and examples of numerous things you can do with these functions, such as bilingual ebooks that translate text when tapped, question and answer quizzes, switching or revealing images when tapped for things like opening doors and changing facial expressions, and much more.
You can download the two templates for FREE, using the code NOVAE for the Advanced Edition, and NOVSE for the Simple Edition. Just add the templates to the shopping cart and enter the codes during checkout to get them free. Each file contains both the epub source files and a compiled mobi for viewing in your Kindle. Be sure to do this before Friday night, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have about them, or any other aspect of ebook production.
And for anyone not able to make it at that time, please feel free to post your questions early and I'll answer them as I can. Or do so on Saturday morning, and I'll stop in at some time and catch up on them then.
Sorry to ramble on so long, but capturing even the barest highlights of a person's life in a single short post hardly does one justice, and even at this length it's a very sketchy overview, believe me!
This is simply a matter of the limitations of digital devices up to this point. Display resolution has been very limited until just recently, and image clarity is dependent on resolution. So with only 800x600 pixels, for example, on the standard eInk displays, you can only get 800 points of information along one dimension of your image, which isn't very much. But now with screens pushing into the 3000 pixel width range, we can have much clearer images. Unfortunately, most ebooks up till now have embedded images at the old low resolution, so we're stuck with them until a new improved edition is released, if it ever is.
This is why I have always pushed for digital content creators to insert images at the highest resolution possible, for forward compatibility. I'll talk more on Friday about image resolution and what is possible on the Kindle now that Amazon has increased the image file size limits. But happily the days of blurry schematics in ebooks should soon be behind us. Remember that we are only at the very beginning of the digital transition, so these are the early pioneering days of ebooks. In 50 or 100 years this will all be like black and white tv.
Thank you so much. I look forward to Friday, as this non-book writer is bound to learn allot. As for the display resolution, I thought of it, as I've seen countles on-line webpages with equaly as bad schematics, and thought "why", lol.
I see my choice of an "Electronic Clipboard" example on the former page was quite appropriate, lol. No one knows what those three light bulbs do, although everyone on the Enterprise has been seen using that contraption to take notes, lol.
Thought I should post a few of my render images as well, given that this is a 3D art forum. :)
This is a straight untouched render I did for the back jacket of the second edition novel mentioned in the post above - The Saga of Beowulf, Part One: The Land of Death & Shadow. It was one of the first big scenes I did, and was a test to create a scene lit entirely by firelight. It was also a real test of my computer's resources, taking nearly 7 hours to render!
You can see the final cropped image that I used for the jacket, as well as a sequence of renders on its development, with running commentary, in my website archives here.
(EDIT) Decided to add the back cover so you can compare the original render with how it was used on the book.
Here's the full wrap-around art I did for the jacket of The Saga of Beowulf, Book Two: The Land of Ice & Fire.
The foreground elements are a single-pass render with no postwork, composited over the background ocean from the original 1st edition cover. The stone inscription was done with a displacement map, and is the Old English rendering of the last lines in the Beowulf poem.
A sequence of render images and commentary on the making of this image can be found http://fantasycastlebooks.com/gallery/beowulf-book2-art.html. (Be sure to click on the tabs to see all the versions of this image)
If you look closely you can see the DAZ frog hidden at the base of the headstone.
These are two versions of the same scene that was intended to be the opening Prologue page to the illustrated version of my Beowulf novelization. Unfortunately, it didn't end up being an illustrated novel, so the art was never used.
This just shows how different visual concepts can be, as these use the exact same elements, just rendered and recombined in different styles. The first is a straight render, with just the spilled wine, ink, and candle smoke added in Photoshop.
The second uses blending layers over watercolor washes and actual scanned parchment to create a print "book" feel. In addition, the rendered elements have been filtered to varying degrees in Photoshop, using Find Edges and Ink Outlines to create a pseudo-comic style. Blending layers played a heavy part in creating the overall look, and the exact steps, as well as additional images in the production process, can be found in the archives here. Again, be sure to click on all the tabs!
This is the opening page spread from my forthcoming 4-volume illustrated series, The Ring Saga, a re-telling of the Norse myth cycle used by Wagner for his opera The Ring of the Nibelungs, as well as being a primary source for Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
As you can see, this builds upon my work with blending watercolor layers to produced a "painted" look. Each volume will run around 100 pages, and feature edge-to-edge art with prose text rather than graphic novel style dialogue balloons. As you can imagine, that's a lot of art to produce.
You'll note the copyright date here is 2011. Little did I know at this point that I would spend the next two years figuring out how to turn this into an ebook!
The original concept test cover for Book One of The Ring Saga series. This is a straight render except for the painted light rays during during title creation in Photoshop. The glowing orb was achieved in a single pass by adding an interior point light seen through a partially transparent sphere with a hammered metallic gold texture applied, and hitting it with three external spotlights.
The boat texture was custom painted with moss before rendering, as were the scales on the Rhinemaidens. These were very early versions of the characters before they achieved their final form. The dwarf Alberich had yet to get a beard or arm hair, and the nymphs all have the same hair and clothing with different diffuse color applied. I'll post an updated version in a minute.
Incidentally, the "Limited Edition Chapbook" was a set of twelve color laser-printed and hand bound editions that I made and gave to friends to read, containing just the first chapter of the book. I used to have the chapter posted on my website as well, but I've since taken it down, as the quality of my art has improved greatly since those early days.
That is a very nice set of renders, and a very good (excellent) implementation of text in the image. Good contrast, etc.
And yet, the thumbnail is another good example of that blurring of the white text on the left of the last post attachment. Friday is really looking like this will be good.
(EDIT)
Post 324, not that last one, lol. It's not as bad as some schematics I've seen, tho it is right there on the edge. If that was a low-res eBook (Electronic Clipboard) device??? Till Friday.
Here the Rhinemaidens have achieved their final differentiated form, each with custom painted skin textures, added fin appendages, and different outfits. Alberich the dwarf has grown some facial hair, courtesy of Poser's dynamic hair, and had a lot of grunge applied to his skin texture. This image required about a hundred layers in composite to achieve the final look.
If you click on the thumbnail and look at the full size image you'll see that there isn't any blurring. I added a drop shadow to make the white text stand out against the green background. But yes, if this were viewed on a low resolution device it would not look great. But this is not the type of book you would read on a black and white e-reader. It's intended specifically for color LCD screens. And, in fact, I originally made it for the iPad, where it looks really stunning, with bright, crisp text and images.
Also, be aware that this is not a page that one would normally ever see as a thumbnail. Covers, yes, but not interior images. At least not where you would try to read them that way.
But there will be a lot of readers with low rez grayscale devices that will try to read it, so it is certainly something to consider. Amazon has generally made fixed layouts only available for download on the color Fire devices to avoid this issue, but readers can also sideload content onto devices themselves, so it will be a problem for some time. My take on it is that if you're dumb enough to buy a full color illustrated ebook and try to read it on a Paperwhite, then it's your own fault. But maybe that's not the best way to look at it. ;)
EDIT: By the way, I should mention that, while here the text is part of the image, in the ebook the text is an actual live font on a separate layer, so it will render clearly, even on smaller screens. It is not part of the image, and therefore the font itself will adjust to different resolutions, while remaining positioned precisely in the same place. That's one of the great advantages of using live text layers, among many others. But again, we'll discuss that on Friday.
Okay, last one for tonight. Just wanted to show you my first real attempt at creating a custom character morph. This is Alberich the dwarf, seen in profile in the previous image. The character was created entirely by extreme tweaking of the standard morphs for Michael 3, and then growing dynamic hair all over the place (plus a bit of morph brush for the wart on his nose).
In the character sheet below you can see the scale reference with the base M3 behind the figure with the final morph applied. I also painted loads of dirt and grunge on his skin and clothing textures, and dirtied up his teeth. This all led me into the wild and wondrous world of modelling and texturing, and most recently digital sculpting with ZBrush.
There goes the next two years of my life...
I love the underwater scene- it feels like I am right there!
And I was wondering where your M3 was, Scot. (He showed me last night.) Those teeth are awesome!
So now that you know a bit about Scot and his work, if that prompts you to ask questions, feel free. Thanks for yours ZDG :)