** ENTRY #1: POSER 7 **

Tales from the Platinum Earth is created on Poser 7 with touch-ups through Photoshop and "comicization" through Comic Life for Windows.

Previously, I had been rendering my images on a Pentium 4 computer with 2GBs of RAM. It was slow, but not unbearably so. Then one day, it simply failed to power up. The computer had died after 6 years of service.

On that same day, I bought a new computer. It is a Quad Core with 4GBs of RAM, so things render faster now, but not amazingly faster. I was able to save my original hard drive so all my poser data and runtimes were saved. For those that are unfamiliar with Poser and what it does, here are a few basic facts:

* Poser is a software program that allows you to render the 3D images you see on this site. All the figures, vehicles and props you see in the images are 3D models that have been purchased or downloaded for free.

* Everything needs to be placed into a scene. Think of it as a digital diorama with the characters like poseable dolls or action figures. You outfit them with clothes and pose them, then you make a render, which is essentially taking a photo of the scene.

* All of this data for the clothes, people and scenes are placed in directories which Poser calls "Runtimes". You can have as many runtimes as you want. One of the big problems with Poser is that it has a very poor organization system for files and people typically spend a lot of time organizing the runtimes themselves. If you lose the runtimes, you lose your Poser toolkit and materials!

* Rendering with Poser 7 is usually done through their in-house program called "Firefly". It can be tricky to render with it sometimes. If you want a render to be of very high quality, it can take over 10 minutes to get your image. You can place things on lower settings and the render will come out in 1 or 2 minutes. The funny thing is sometimes the differences between the 10 minute render and the 2 minute one are almost insignificant (at least from my point of view - I'm sure others would disagree).

* Poser has a function to create motion blur but it's very poor. The workaround is to do the motion blur in Photoshop, which produces much better results. For me, motion blur is an important part of action scenes.

* Poser is a memory hog. If you place too many figures and props into one scene, the program will crash. My rule of thumb is absolutely no more than four figures in the one scene, and even that may be pushing it. The workaround is to render two separate images and put them together in a composite.

**ENTRY #2: SCARED OF SHADOWS**

Poser is a nice program. It’s not perfect and it has many flaws, but it’s nice nonetheless.
There are lots of interesting features in Poser that contribute to the overall realism of an image. Two examples of this are “cast shadowsâ€

** ENTRY #3 - GEOPOLITICS? **

You may have noticed (if you have cared to read any of the stories that I have created) that I tend to slip a lot of
geopolitical references into the Acts of The Platinum Earth (TPE). Now, it is probably strange given the predominant themes of Hipcomix, but I can honestly say I don't know how to write a story like this any other way.

Obviously, the material in TPE is designed to cater to the readership of this site and that will always be an indisposable
element of the stories. People want to see heroines in peril and in other arousing situations...it is the realization of
fantasies that mainstream publications have teased us with but can never actually provide, well, at least in the west
(because Japan is a different kettle of fish).

But for me, an important part of my "artistic expression" is to create a believable world. If I'm spending so much of my free
time creating TPE, I feel I should make it as well as I can. That is, not to constrain myself to boundaries based on what I
think people want to see versus my desire to tell a story. Obviously, this is a fine balancing act.

People have noted one of the differences between the Marvel and DC universes is the fact that Marvel tends to stick
(generally) with our Earth as their base setting while DC is more liberal in creating fictional cities and nations. Of course
it's all fantasy, but I must say I lean towards the Marvel way of thinking. In the same way every good lie is based on truth, I believe a good story should be based on something (more) familiar.

For me, that was an exercise in "alternate history". If you have ever read authors like Harry Turtledove (I am not a fan of
his work), you'll know what I mean. Basically, you take a point in history and take that on a tangent. For TPE, my tangent is the year 1947. Everything before that was our Earth, our histories and experiences. You take this existing base and then extrapolate that into the fantasy scenario you have created. For it to be believable, you have to consider a whole range of things such as history, politics and economics.

For example, in the future acts of TPE, I'll be dealing with China's place on this planet. If you've read all the issues of
TPE up until this point (and if you're reading this post but you haven't, then please do so!) you'll know I place small dribs
and drabs of info about what kind of Earth this actually IS. It's no spoiler then, to say that this Earth has been visited by
aliens. So to use China as a case study, I had to consider these sorts of things:

* The geography and ethnicities of China?
We have flat land in the east with good farming land. The SW is ringed with mountains and laced with rivers but also benefits from some good farming land in the Sichuan Basin. This area is highly defensible. The populations of both these areas are mainly Han Chinese, although the SW is dotted with many other ethnicities. Religion is a mix of atheist communism, Daoist beliefs and superstitions, Confucian ethics and Buddhism.
In the NW, we have intractable portions of desert home to nomads and settlers that have spilled over from Central Asia. Below that we have the mountainous regions of Tibet.

This kind of information is important for:
1) Defining the borders of fictional regions
2) Working out the ethnicities of the characters in your story. For example, if you want to tell a story in the NW of China,
it would be more likely the characters would be Uygurs and Kazaks than Han Chinese. OK, then you need to do a bit of research on these people...what is there history, what do they believe and how would they act in the situations you place them in?

* What was the situation in China in 1947?
China was at war with itself, the Communists were slowly gaining the upper hand over the Nationalists but victory would not be complete until 1949. The Soviets were still active around Manchuria and Mongolia. Aliens coming to Earth...how is that going to effect the course of events playing out in China between these two sides and the nations that support them (ie. the USSR and the West respectively). Apply the historical tangent you have created yet keep everybody as rational actors within your hypothetical situation. How does China look now and how does it relate to the other nations of the Earth?

* What are the economics of China?
Somewhat industrialized, Manchuria and the NE is where the bulk of the industry was with some in the south. Much of it has been devastated with a 10+ year war with Japan. Moving inland, you have an agrarian society. Whoever has the NE is going to be technologically advantaged over the inland. Add to this a human desire to take advantage of an infusion of alien technology and China's trade links to foreign nations. Now extrapolate this development over the next 50 years given various hypothetical factors you create yourself. What does the China of 2000 look like?

Repeat this process for every region of the Earth and you have some kind of idea of some of the thought processes I go
through when creating my stories for TPE. Now I want to stress that TPE is about sexy heroines first and foremost, but the stage that they act on is created by what I have just described. Hopefully, my success in this endeavor will rest on the readership here having the choice of appreciating the backdrop if they want or ignoring it totally by focusing on the "sexy action" occurring in the story, which I hope is appealing to the readers here. One thing I want to avoid is a character breaking out into a big soliloquy ,lecturing the reader on a point of socio-economics. That is not going to happen. I want to treat the readers here as being mature enough that they can appreciate a good story along with the realization of their sexy heroine fantasies.

** ENTRY #4: CHARACTER CREATION **

Looking over my word document that contains my character roster, I’m counting 105 names. That’s a lot of names to be having on a roster like this, considering in October 2008 I placed a moratorium on myself to stop at 75. I admit I was a little torn. With a cast this big and The Platinum Earth coming out biweekly basis, a lot of these characters will be destined to have only a cursory characterization. Or even worse, the ones I want to focus on will not get enough time to really flesh out their personality, their history and what motivates them.

But it’s a risk I’m willing to take. Even if half these characters are only dealt with in the briefest of manners, they are there in this “living and breathingâ€