SolyWack

Sweet. I'll probably finish up those top two BGs, then I'll just have a few background rigs to make before I can actually animate it all.

No changes necessary, this is perfect. ----- I don't think flash takes that much to run. If I could, I would upgrade to CC (or even "Animate" now) for that sweet 64-Bit architecture, so it would take more. But alas, I am shackled to cs6.

I meant that I wing the shapes, but I have to make sure every hole is filled, ever angle is perfect, and every curve is... curvy? When I really don't need to most of the time. And no, there isn't any deadlines, I just assumed from your progress that you'd be done by then. Take your time. I'm still finishing up my backgrounds (ones that weren't on the collage obviously), so you don't need to rush. Sorry if I made you uneasy. Lastly, I am going to zoom in on Twilight's window, although it looks like I got here a bit late, so if you don't want to go back and edit, that's fine. Just thought I was obliged to answer you.

My dreams are the most epicly awesome things. One example is in my dream, I was this bounty hunter/ theif/ doesnt really matter, and I got a letter listing a bunch of names. It said each person on this list also got a letter. One name had a star and was written next to it "this person was also given 1 million dollars. His location was given So naturally as a renegade baddass, I traveled over to the mansion on the list. It turns out the reciever was actually a woman. A woman who was more or less a ninja. I brought a friend along and we almost beat her, then her butler came out wrecked us, all with a straight face (as butlers do). Suddenly, cannons start shooting through the windows. We decided on a temporary truce, then retreated into the catacombs beneath the mansion. We fought off undead knights until we got to a swampy underground river. Undead ambushed us, and we lost the butler. Last part: We got to where the river ended, and it was very swampy (and still underground). There was a fort and a short wall on the opposite side. THEN a group of mercenaries after the money ambushed us in the fort, so we ducked down behind the wall. We were out of arrows, but get this, we started throwing milk buckets (yes milk) at the fort. At this point I was like WTF, and woke up shortly after that. Thats my story, my dreams are weird.

I figured you knew what you were doing. I do a little graphic design and digital art alongside animation, so I've been conditioned to use layers religiously. It's very annoying, to me at least, to have a bunch of different objects placed on a single layer, and having to mess around with the "arrange" option. I just put all objects on new layers so I can lock and rearrange easily. The clutter isn't an issue for me. Its likely there are ways to work more efficiently on single layers, but a bunch of layers works fine so And your right about the lights and reflections, but I've found most of the light/reflection in the Crystal Prep BGs are bright, muted yellows with varying opacities. If they weren't originally yellow, then the yellow mimics it enough to the point you need to grab a magnifying glass and study them to ascertain the difference.

Looks really good. I would say you don't need to follow the clouds exactly, but... yeah. I myself just usually completely wing any of the more twisty-curvy-made to annoy you stuff, and in the end it looks just as good, just a bit different. But you do you, 'tis fine by me. I'll await next weekend for the completed background, and does this mean your doing #5 as well? If so, the way I do the lights is actually pretty simple. Because you gave me a .fla, I assume you're using flash to make them. 1) Just make a new layer, and use the circle ellipse tool to create an oval in about the same shape as the light. 2) Put a radial gradient in the oval. 3)Then put white with 0% alpha on the outside, and a bright, but muted yellow on the inside with 10-40% alpha (that 10-40 controls how bright it is) Then just figet around with the alpha, sliders, free transform tool, and gradient tool until you have the light you need. Most of the time, this is more than enough for me. You can adjust the shape of the gradient or even erase part of the oval entirely to make it fit. Maybe you knew how to do this already, but it's always good to share technique just in case. And as for why I need vectors, a photoshop would be no different from a screenshot, because they're both bitmap. You can't zoom without it getting pixely, and you can see the pixels shift with any movement of the camera. Here's an example: http://sta.sh/06u0pm9i6wl. A still background might be okay for a photoshopped BG, but it still might be blurry if you needed to resize it for proper resolution. Vectors just negate all these, and look clean and smooth all the time.

Looks great so far. As for the vines, you don't have to recreate them path for path. As long as they look like vines, it's fine by me.