Official "Discuss the latest page" thread

[Maanvis]

is it just me or do the pancakes in de bonus page have too much shading for their size?

PS: This is my first post here, I really enjoy Crimson Dark so I thought I'd say HI .

[Lokekar Kra]

[quote="David"][quote="Some Useless Geek"]I still see it as oxymoronic...[/quote]
I don't think that word means what you think it means...[/quote]
LOL, Princess Bride FTW!!

[CygnusX1]

is it just me or do the pancakes in de bonus page have too much shading for their size?

They are very important, attract attention. So if they don't look realistically, they will kill the disbelief of reality.

From the top, they look great!
Unfortunately, however, from this perspective, in my opinion, they could be a bit better on the model side. At the moment they look like slightly deformed flat cylinders made out of... hm... plastic?
Their border is (or seems to be) perfectly perpendicular to the top flat surface (which seems to be completely flat) and to the surface of the table.
My intuition would suggest trying some small displacement mapping... or bending the border... but I am no modeller...

[Mercy Machine]

Awesome page on lighting. Never realised how much went into it. That last "fuzzy highlight" mask tip solved a little problem I've been wrestling with in GIMP. 谢谢！

[Fen]

... Never realised how much went into it. ...

Same here! The end result looks really good

Roll on Monday and Chapter 11!

~Fen

[ABCWizard]

David- As much as I am enjoying the strip, I am enjoying watching your development as an artist/modeler even more. I don't know of any one on line that is in your class. There are folks who have done some spectacular things as one off demonstration projects but your performance working in a tough time budget environment is extraordinary. Thank you.

[wingsofwrath]

I'm a long time follower of Crimson Dark but first time poster so first please allow me to congratulate you on the quality of this webcomic, both in terms of art as well as writing.

In any case, today's page made me stare for quite a few minutes, even though it's not a regular update.
I am myself an aspiring comic book artist with a few projects currently in development (I used to have my own website a few years ago but took it down after I realised my stories were in desperate need of a rewrite, and now I am waiting for them to be complete before I put them online again) and one of them takes place in a quasi-socialist post apocalyptic society (not the run of the mill Mad Max / Fallout variety, mind you, but set a few hundred years after the extinction event, when the environment is stable and society is on the mend). When I started the project, a couple of years ago, one of the first things I needed for this world was a coherent socio-economic model, and I decided to make my own design rather than go with one of the accepted ones. As you can probably guess by now, what I came up with is almost identical to the class system of the Cirin Alliance - wages set in terms of usefulness to the state, a "base" salary that is enough to live by for those unable or unwilling to work, etc. The main difference was the addition of a sixth, supplementary class for families with children, because in the light of the disaster that affected my world population growth is a serious thing and must be subsidized by the state. Thus, the whole family will receive allowance of one "base" salary for each child as well as access to luxury items equivalent to "essential industries" ("indispensables" in my classification) until the coming of age of their progenies, at which moment the parents will revert to their earlier classes and the new adults into the lowest one.

[David]

Hmm, interesting. Cirin society is based on sustainability rather than perpetual growth, and there are actually financial disincentives for families who have more than three children.

[wingsofwrath]

In my case, the state incentives are offered to keep the population from shrinking! During the "fall" (a few decades of war, environmental disasters and other such "goodies" rather than a single apocalyptic event) most of the world's population migrated off-world in generation ships (sorry, hard sci-fi, no FTL) leaving behind the weak and diseased, including those afflicted with a rare genetic disease (introduced by bioterrorists, no less) that causes sterility in 30% of offspring. While stop-gap measures such as in vitro fertilization managed to keep the population from diminishing too rapidly, people are encouraged to multiply and thus large families are rewarded... For those unable to have natural children, there's always the option of volunteering to raise test tube babies, that would gain you the same benefits natural children would.

[Kahn_Iceay]

I loved todays page I have to say, the glimpse into the political background of Crimson Dark is very entertaining. I wouldn't mind seeing more stuff like this at all.