So things continue to develop.
I was thinking of overlaying a "spell diagram" on the terrain that would have involved a lot of text and geometrical design, and found myself thinking that (a) this was boring and (b) this wasn't going to be particularly striking graphically -- especially for a book cover, a situation where when you've uploaded the image to Amazon, people will wind up making the buy/no-buy decision guided by an image that may be not much bigger than a postage stamp.
Without warning something occurred to me. Over on my Flickr (
https://www.flickr.com/photos/dianeduane/) there are a lot of fractal images produced by an iPad app called Fractile + (no longer available, unfortunately: a shame, because it produces beautiful results and gives wonderful color control). I thought "Well, instead of this diagram, which isn't going to look like much and is going to be a lot of work to produce anyway, why not use one of these fractals?" So I grabbed one and tossed it into my original .tgd instead of the test pattern that had been there. You can see it below.
I then tested it with the masking layer, which worked fine (thanks Jokes!). (Slightly different positioning / angle on the one below as I started playing with the shader image's scale and position.)
So now I can foresee how this workflow is going to go, I think. One render
without the character but with the original fractal graphic in place, so as to preserve the colors. One render
with the character so as to catch the glow. Then the two will get combined. There may be a third render if that planet acts badly because of differing settings between the first two: we'll see how that goes.
More as it happens.
-- DD
