Added 4 new A* comics:I should mention that generally lights, stars, etc shining in space won't have a big beam or halo, since there's nothing in the vacuum of space to reflect light like there is in the air around us here on Earth. I've been doing a lot of halos and things in this current episode 5 scene, though, and I suppose the excuse I could make about it is that the scene takes place in a planetary ring system, and those tend to have lots of dust and ice particles in them (even though mine is unusually "chunky" with all those big asteroids), and those could cause light to scatter and create halos and beams and things.
The *real* reason though is that it looks cool. ;D Especially in the dailies, which don't have the benefit of animation, it's been helping me illustrate depth and direction; this ring system setting is kind of tough for that, because there are tons of objects floating around, but nothing concrete about most of them that can give a sense of scale--you can't tell just from its outline if an asteroid is small and close by, or big and far away--so using atmospheric depth and depth of field effects in grayscale helps with that. And I've been using a larger halo effect here and there to help show in which direction the system's Sun can be found, which hopefully helps to orient the viewer in this big field of rubble.
Oh yeah, and beams and trails can help give a sense of the animation in the non-animated dailies, so I've been using them for that, too: missile trails, and in these last couple dailies, to help punctuate the change from lights off to lights on--in that big whatever-it-is that Selenis has a gun pointed at!
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