About Raven Spectre
Raven Spectre is a classically trained animator creating both cell and 3D armature animations. During his first professional job, he was exposed to 3D computer animation using 3dstudio. Moving on to a newspaper publishing company, he occassionally created animations for TV commercials, in-house video productions, speaker-support presentations, as well as advertising campaigns shown at a professional baseball stadium in Chicago, IL. During that time he was using 3dstudio max as well as Adobe After Effects.
More recently, while doing a random Google image search, he discovered the growing market for 3D graphic images. He found a lot of artists creating some amazing images and image sets. Without having the resources to purchase software like 3D Studio Max, he wondered how all of this artwork was being created.
By pure chance, Raven Spectre saw an online ad for the open-source animation program Daz Studio. The software was free to download and use. Included in the download were some starter characters, sets, props, clothes, etc.
Raven Spectre began learning and tinkering with the software gradually developing his first image set "Into the Chasm". Raven Spectre was not happy with the results. He updated the characters to the next Daz Studio Gen8. As work continued on "Into the Chasm", he realized the image set was getting too large to compile into a single series. The image set was split into parts 1 and 2.
Working on both image sets, something was bothering him. The longer he looked at the final results, the more he didn't like the lighting of the chasm. Lighting was the biggest challenge. Rather than using hdri images to evenly light the entire chasm, Raven Spectre was looking for a more cinematic look using individual spot lights to make the main platform appear to be suspended over a volcanic lava lake. Lighting the two characters was problematic. Shadows and dark area continued to plague the scene. Being a perfectionist, he continually changed the lights and their positions making certain the results on one frame would work the same on every frame.
On the fifth rendering of the image set 1, Raven Spectre finally realized his vision, which only lead to relighting and rerendering part 2.
In May of 2020 while being furloughed from his current job, Raven Spectre took a chance and submitted a vendor request form to the Affect 3D Store. After a few weeks of anxiously waiting, he was surprised to learn he had been accepted as an artist vendor.
"Into the Chasm Part 1" was released for sale by the Affect 3D Store on July 16, 2020.