For those of you who are following Silent Shadow, here is a cross-post from the Silent Shadow website:

Work on Silent Shadow has virtually halted, due to a few reasons. One—the biggest reason—is school. I’m also in the midst of a creative slump, probably because of school. Ironic considering that I am currently attending an art school. A lot of it could be just life in general. In my humble opinion, the comic could be so much more but I really don’t want to start over again, considering that I’ve already started over on the storyline twice.

The thing is, when I started Silent Shadow, I was still practically a kid. That was four years ago and I’ve done quite a bit of growing up since then—the vast majority of it over the last two years. So yes, I’m saying that my outlook has changed from four years ago. Despite that, I don’t want to abandon Silent Shadow. However, I do want to improve it. To improve it, though. That means time and unfortunately, on the run-up to graduation, time is something I don’t have, so it pains me to say this but the break is going to be a lot longer than I anticipated. I do have Page 24 almost ready to be rendered out but instead of getting folks hyped with one page at the start of the final chapter, I’m thinking that I’ll come back to the storyline once I’m finished with school, and hopefully this time I’ll finish Hawk & Wolf by next fall.

That's preview #1. I'll have more out of Poser 8 coming up here over the next few days. One of the features I'm testing out is the ability to light a scene using nothing but objects that have their ambient color settings turned on. All I have to say is this looks promising. While I'm doing this, I'm also slowly working on Page 24. The reason I say "slowly" is that I'm trying to get a bunch of other shit done around the house before I go back to classes on Tuesday. Once winter break rolls around, I'll have more time to get stuff done because that's my next (and last) three week break. After that break, is Spring Break at the end of March and then in April is the start of my final quarter at Ai Minnesota.

*sighs* Yes, I know I haven't been that active on DevArt. Not as much as I was last year, really. Some of that has to do with school; some of it doesn't. Back at the beginning of the year, I had to deal with some dArama, which was rather unexpected considering how things have been pretty quiet for me here over the last 6 years. Maybe it's because in those last six years, I've watched dA change. What's funny is, I discussed this with a class-mate at the end of last quarter (Fall Quarter '09) and we both agreed that the changes here haven't been all that great, that it was better when °jark ran the site. The class-mate in question hasn't been active on dA in almost two years, and unfortunately I can't remember his username >:[ hate that, don'cha'know? Truth-be-told, the changes of dA can't all be blamed on the changes in leadership. A lot of it has to do with not only the growth of dA itself but the growth of the internet as well.

Anyway, I miss being active; I miss talking to folks. So I think I'm going to be coming back and updating my journal regularly even if I don't have anything Gallery-worthy. And yeah, besides school, I still have a list of things that need doing. Projects to catch up on, that sort of thing

I've been doing some more work with Poser 8 and its toon shading options. Well, what I thought was a bug is actually an improvement on Poser's method of rendering lines. You don't have to set the LineWidth value to an insane amount to get a "somewhat" acceptable line. Setting it to 0.25 produces a really nice result. I'll have some full renders up sometime soon to demonstrate.

While I'm fooling around with these new features, I'm also tentatively starting to work on Page 24. I'm not sure how far I'm going to get with it before the new quarter starts, though.

And, I'm also working on a cel-shading technique tutorial for Poser and Photoshop. Will have that up before next week, too.

Well, I am on break! I don't go back to school until October 5th. Can't promise that I'll have anything new to post, though. I am sorry that I haven't been around but this past quarter kept me pretty busy.

Anyway, I got Poser 8 back at the beginning of August and I haven't had that much time to play around with it. A service release update for Poser 8 has come out so I made sure to get that to see if it corrected that ToonShader issue I've been having. Apparently, it doesn't. BUT, I did find what was causing the problem. It seems that having a LineWidth value set to 2 causes the blacking out that I noticed in renders. Turning LineWidth off totally erases that. Even better, I'd written a set of Python scripts to change certain ToonShader values on the fly, like the LineWidth value. So, no great loss in productivity there

So I don't know if I'll pick up the yarn with Silent Shadow or just wait until after next quarter is over, where I have a three-week break and thus, more time to get things done. I do have a new icon set to upload, and I'll probably do that sometime in the next week.

Anyway, till next time

That a tornado passed within about a quarter mile of your house and you have no storm damage whatsoever!