details -19-

posted 2009.11.27 at 02:46

Aug. 1 2009 - Working backwards from here. This is the first page of the scene in which the Daedalus has been upgraded. The change is relatively minor - from ink-and-paint to not ink-and-paint, from scanline to mental ray. I'm not replacing the entire environment - just the ship. I'd decided awhile back that it was a bullshit idea and that I'd stick with the cell shader despite the inconsistencies, but then I realized that I still have most - if not all - of the render files. My inability to find some of the solo Daedalus shots is what was hanging me up - if they turn up, great. If not, I'll match them as best as possible and rework the shots from scratch. I have all of the ship-in-the-environment shots, and I figured they'd be the tough ones.

Tedious, but not as difficult as I'd thought - for this page, anyway.

The Daedalus won't be the only element of the scene to be replaced - the earth shot (bottom of the page) is going as well, but I'll do that after I've finished replacing the ship, and have had the time to make other adjustments.

20090905 (20) - Lettered. For the record, I'm particularly happy with this bit of the rewrite.

First Edition Metadata

OPD : 2005.11.17 @ 20:38

If I had all year to burn on exposition and aesthetic (and I don't, honest!), there'd be a two-pager of the Daedalus cargo bay, with Xand and Raven heading up to the deck and West holding Tantek behind to rap at him for a minute. You're getting the dialogue with a takeoff sequence instead - I'm saving the first non-bridge interior shots of the Daedalus for a Specific Event in the story and don't feel like spoiling (or modeling) it yet.

The dragon thingy in panel four is indirectly foreshadowed in Speculation and somewhat more intimately implied in Recon. Why would John leave the base open if he didn't have a babysitter arranged? I feel like I'm handholding, but in production time those pages haven't been on the top of the site in well over a year, though they'll doubtlessly be fresh in the minds of anyone who skims the hardcopy.

The globe utilizes a tweaked version of J. C. Noir's photorealistic earth augmented with Blue Marble and NOAA maps.

Details has taken almost FOUR MONTHS from beginning to end - I think that's a frigging record and I hope to heck that a scene never takes this long to produce again. Thanks for tolerating the lag - the production pace of scene two will be much more reasonable, I promise.

Appended : The engine shround in panel four is bugging the shit out of me and the hardcopy came off streaky, so I'll be doing a couple of fixes on Friday or Saturday.

12:53 <xeno> ...
12:55 <xeno> asdlgjfasd
12:55 <xeno> details -19- clean
12:55 <xeno> "Xand's got a thing for Fett."
12:55 <xeno> assbooger.
12:56 * xeno almost snargled on his cola

Edited 20051108, 1851 : Fixed up the shroud.

Edit, 20070719 : Touched up the biomagnetic dragon thinger so it's less In Your Face.