Culmination

Another news entry.

I finally finished Lord of Chaos last night. I think it's one of my favorites so far. It seemed like the Fires of Heaven was the Empire Strikes back of the Series. It had split people up all over the place with new plot creating and twisting on itself- it was hard to keep up at times with all the people and directions they were going in. In contrast, LoC was wrapping up a lot of the loose ends into an obvious direction and in general was moving the plot along instead of trying to create more. It was very fun to read.

I was just reflecting on how Eye of the World was a really different book than the rest of the series. It was mostly concerned with a mostly Indiana Jones feel with the race to the Mountains of Dhoom. EoW could very nearly stand alone, like the plot for a TV show. The rest of the books by contrast require being read back to back or with the assistance of quicknotes in order to keep up with the more subtle subplots.

I have been working heavily in Maya lately, and I'm happy that my modeling skills haven't suffered. But I am reminded that there are still many more ways to create a shader- specifically metallics. The problem being with many substances is that they interact with light in principal ways that are not naturally constructed. They have to be tied in with specialized light networks. I've already made many realistic shaders from clever Photoshop manipulation, but any light tricks would have to be aligned to the camera direction nodes to maintain accuracy. That's more of a pain than I would want to do every time I want to make a crystal or silver texture.

I can't wait to go into character modeling again, I have such exciting ideas to play with the Cloth engine.