Page 8 is nearly finished. The panels are rendering as I type this, in fact. Now, when Page 8 will be posted…well, that I don’t know. I’m behind on my school work, unfortunately. I managed to miss a week of school; I’ve been sick for most of this week so now I’m left to play catch up.

As my webcomic manager plugin, its going to be a little longer. I had planned to work on it just a little bit more but because I’m now behind at school, I think I’d better not. Its probably ready for release now, its just that I have some other things to do with the package — like designing a default layout and proper help files.

This shouldn’t have come as no big surprise now but I didn’t quite realize it at the time. Because of the nature of the shaders that I use for my characters, its hard to use IBL/HDR based lighting with them. I realized this with the new render of Page 8 (formerly Page 10). Part of the problem is the diffuse-ness of the lights. For the shaders to really work with IBL or HDR, you need a strong secondary light source. That means that the light probe can’t contain light information that pertains to another strong light source (ie: the sun). I realized this when I first developed the shaders but somehow, I managed to forget about that when it came time to redo my comic.

Perhaps, in the next series, Syleth will get a new hairdo. The trans-maps for Daz’s Wild & Messy hair is just terrible when it comes to rendering times.

And, as far as status on Page 8. It has stalled slightly. I’ll start work on it when my spring cold clears up. May ZiCam work like it should!

Well, I am happy to report that I have finally updated Pages 6 and 7 have been uploaded, and no, it isn’t your imagination but yes, the pages are a bit smaller. I exported them directly out of Illustrator at 100dpi, I suspect that the other pages were exported out of Photoshop at approximately 130dpi.

Now, as for the Comic Manager. It has a little further to go than I thought. I am now using my plugin to manage the comic and I found a few problems and even figured out a few new features to add to it. So, yeah. Probably a few more weeks of development time.