More Cover Fun

Every once in a while, I make a little progress on redoing the cover for The Chaos Job. It's a wacky, heartwarming SF romp involving people stuck on a planet in the middle of nowhere, with damaged AIs, homicidal sheep, forbidden gods, and a bit of romance.

So... Having said that, here's the current cover:

I am absolutely not complaining about the cover designers I paid to do this, because they did exactly what I told them to do. It looks professional, which at least gives it some credibility. But I don't think it's attracting the right audience.

As we all know, I've never lacked in self-confidence, so sure, I can totally do this myself! And this was part of the reason I was trying to get more comfortable using Daz3D back in February.

This is the first iteration:

As a first pass (and not rendered fully), I think it's a good start. Some things that I will bang my head against the wall about:

• Lighting (sigh) It's all blown out. 
• Her hair. I really am going to have to bite the bullet and pay for better hair.
• Ha ha, I just noticed there's a chicken in the middle of the wheel. (Actually, that's kind of funny and totally a thing a chicken might do, so I'm tempted to leave it.)
• There needs to be less ground and more sky. Plus, I think I need to angle it so there's less of the building on the right.
• The dark thing in the sky is a spaceship, but it's totally not obvious. Probably I need to use a different background image than this, or at least move it over so the back of the spaceship is visible.
  
  
  
  
  
• The sheep needs something darker behind it for contrast.

So, yeah, lots to fix. But I think the vibe is a little closer. And I need to figure out why it created a 9000x10000 image when I asked it to render 1600x2560. Clearly, I'm missing something, and when I fix that, it will probably render faster.