-impact-

posted 2009.11.27 at 14:14

20100105 : Re-covered. Placeholder here, spread below.

After a number of false starts on motion and the staring-at-it-for-hours sickfest of descent... and knowing that subversion and the main cover are both going to be time consuming... I wanted something that could be banged out QUICK.

Hence, this cover - a quick blend of two renders. The outer security entrance to psi-obs on the front, and the inner lock on the back. Not terribly dramatic, but the climax takes place smack between the two, so it's quite appropriate. Not as detail-heavy as motion, but really - does it need to be? The cover has a nice "brooding" feel to it, similar to what was (inappropriately) invoked with the first edition reentry cover(s). Here, it works.

Rendered and assembled Monday morning - subtract sleep and we're talking a whole six hours of staring at the thing before completing it in a few quick strokes. After the last few covers, that's a massive improvement!

Hopefully this means I'm over The Illness. Whatever it is.

While not The Best (that would be the cover for the previous chapter), this one's certainly a favorite. Also, easily adapted to 6x9.

First Edition Metadata

OPD : 2006.07.13 @ 15:26

It'll be early to mid August before the Chapter gets rolling in earnest. This is due entirely to hardware availability and CPU time, so if any of you happen to have a spare >2ghz x86 box I could borrow for a few months, things will get moving earlier than that. At this point the script still needs quite a bit of layout work, and I still have to do some modeling (see previous re: CPU time). Aside from that, I'm just about ready to go.

Bonus : Chapter Seven is almost entirely written. This happened by accident during one of the sessions I'd intended to get some work done on Chapter Six - work that got done anyway. So there's no hurting in the writing department.

Technical : This cover took much less time to render than the last one - 55 hours, 44 minutes and 57 seconds. As usual, the Photoshopping was sneezed out in considerably less time. I'd intended for this cover to be more comic-booky, but the Greater ATC Aesthetic asserted itself and scratchy sepia came out instead, for the win.

Desktop versions, by request: 1280x1024 (420k), 1600x1200 (600k), and 1680x1050 (580k).