-motion-

posted 2009.11.27 at 01:36

20100101 - I've never been happy with the covers I've generated for this chapter - Motion seems to be particularly cursed in that respect, as you can see from the iterations in the first edition metadata. While that's finally been fixed to some extent, it took quite a bit of work to get to the current cover - three or four iterations, starting over from scratch each time. A lot of rendering. While it hardly implies "Motion," it does feature environments from the story - in that respect, this cover is a MASSIVE improvement over previous versions.

TD2E placeholder crop of TD1E cover is here, spread below.

20090906- This is still my least favorite and most "uh... what?" cover. Hopefully when I get around to finishing up the replacements, things will improve!

First Edition Metadata

Finally invoked something that scratched the "red" itch.

For some reason covers are always a hassle - might be the fact that they only vaguely relate to the story. Might be the fact that they're not actually part of the sequential narrative - in the mythical Final Form of The Dualist, the "covers" might be in the back somewhere with a What If? sidebar, alongside some Candy or whatever.

And since it's not actually part of the story, and the only rule of thumb is "no line art", I have a tendency to be extremely indecisive, as you can see here:

The first and fourth instances are incomplete, unfinished, and juslty aborted. The other two represent a few hours screwing around with a Z axis, trying to get something interesting. Fourth and final title have both passed through Macromedia Freehand, which has a lovely little Trace tool that I played with for the first time today- an experiment that grew out of a half-remembered bit about Flash "trace bitmap"ping kicked loose in the backbrain by a Penny Arcade newspost.

I wouldn't be surprised if this changes again before I start actual production. Until {then|I actually start the chapter}, this beats looking at the end of Chapter Three. :-)