Or maybe that's the sinuses. The pot is mostly rendered. The dirty secret to 3d art is the endless round of render, tweak, render again. As the final render series is over 4K pixels, those are long renders. Built the Mauser ammo and dipped into the appropriately named Bullet physics engine to drop a pile of them on the ground. Poser11 continues to not play nicely with the spherical world map function; first IBL/HDRI light map didn't work properly, and now the reflections look like shit. Something has changed. I've been doing reflection maps since Poser9 at least.
At least I've learned; to render in lighting layers so I can fix them in the final comp, and to let small stuff go if I am confident I can fix it with a paint brush a lot faster than I can fix it in the 3D scene. (No examples will be forthcoming. I have some stuff at a...different...graphic sharing site under a different name.)
I mocked up the cover with all the words and other graphics (well, waiting on the final renders), read up on fonts, wrote the blurb, put my data into Kindle Direct Publishing, and started an author's web site.
There's a lot of work in packaging a book. On the book itself, I need to do a couple small edit passes, including one looking just at closing quotation marks to make sure my various softwares didn't monkey up the capitalization on dialogue attributions. ("I'm not angry!" she shouted, but, "I'm out of here." He left the room.) And make sure I've set all the flags correctly so scene and chapter breaks come where they belong.
The blurb needs to be edited and there are some other bits and pieces that need to get added to the full text that shows up on the Kindle page. And I have to take another pass with Rocket at categories and keywords -- especially since I am going KDP Select and I have some additional keywords I can plug in.
The final assembly of the cover, of course. And then once the eBook is completed, go through the formatting and cover art stage again to get the paperback version into the shop.
And there's the usual mess of bio, picture...advertising, publicity, links...
Oh, yeah. And I really want to have another book in the store as soon as possible. I really should have started this with something other than Athena Fox. Because I know better now what I need to plan and outline a novel, and the Athena Fox series is constrained to stay in more-or-less the real world and be as accurate as I can afford about it. I could knock out two volumes of The Tiki Stars in less time than it would take to complete the London research for Fox and Hounds. And that's not even counting taking a research trip of my own out there.
Especially attractive if I could come up with the five hundred quid to "volunteer" at an archaeological dig whilst I was there...
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