Hey, you like this comic, right? If you think it worthy (and/or you’re bored) go nominate us over at Webcomic Planet for this year’s Webcomic Reader’s Choice Awards. The nomination process ends on October 31st, followed by voting for each category.

You can see who won last year at this page.

That reminds me, are there more webcomic ranking and listing sites that I should sign the comic up for? I just added Webcomic Planet (that’s when I saw the above news). Below is a partial list of sites I listed the comic on. Promoting the comic takes effort! Honestly, the best way to promote the comic is for you (the readers) to tell your friends, and I appreciate that. Thank you!

Top Web Comics, The Webcomic List, Comicspace, Webcomic Planet, Webcomicz, ChoiceComics, Comic Rank

I switched to a new rendering scheme in Maya. I started experimenting with IBL (image based lighting) a couple pages ago, taking up a lot of time. One of the big goals was lighting improvement and consistancy, and since Maya and Vue don’t like to play nice together, I switched to IBL. One of the neat things Vue can do is render these fancy images that, when stretched onto a sphere, can be used to light the scene and be rendered as a backdrop.

With the “old” method of rendering and compositing, I had the whole scene with characters set up and rendered in Vue. This didn’t always work nicely because the character, and any imported objects, had to have their textures manually adjusted, which took a lot of time to fix. The second method was to render the backdrop/scenery in Vue, render the characters in Maya, and then composite (combine) them in Photoshop. The downside of this was that the lights in Maya had to be tweaked to match the lighting in the scene and to provide enough illumination and proper shadows.

Here are some samples showing the new rendering with Maya, the bandit girl. The first is an early render, before the lighting intensity was adjusted. The background was not added in Photoshop, it is from the “lighting sphere”. The second image is a close-up shot from page 60, with the third image being the same shot but color corrected in Photoshop. Click on the images to open them in a new window.

Wow, lots of writing. This will be moved to a “faq” page later.