reentry -3-

posted 2009.04.18 at 18:47

Minor cleanup; added a new panel to fill out the page - the first shot of the Cheops since the opening pages of Chapter One.

It might be my eyes (which have been flaking out on me pretty hard today*), but the Cheops looks great when the page is viewed fullscreen against a black background... and it's Invisible Mud otherwise. Argh!

Oh, and. That panel was rendered after the last panel of reentry -7- and before the first panel of said page. WHY?!, you ask? Simple - this one's point-and-click, and the panel I'm strategically putting off is Work. Since I'm doing Daedalus shots in chronological order (and kinda want to get everything involving said ship rolling in the same order) and had other things on my plate today, the Cheops got rendered. It helps that the Cheops needed planetary positioning that I didn't get nailed down until panel five of reentry -7-... the kind of hurdle that's holding up the rest of ATC, but one you won't really see thanks to the "convenience" of my rolling internet outage. Three weeks on and life without being able to drunk dial the rest of the world at 2am is... productive.

Perish the thought.

* The "it might be my eyes" paragraph was written on April 1 2009, referring to March 31 2009 (it's fucking APRIL ALREADY WHAT THE SHIT?!). These second edition entries have a habit of growing organically - I keep 'em all in one file, update them when something occurs to me, and eventually couple them with the first edition metadata. While the 1e metadata is (almost totally) accurate to its post date, a 2e entry can be done days (or weeks) before it gets posted. It can be written a paragraph here, a paragraph there, days apart. It's a lot like the REST of the comic that way.

If only the plot were as easy to talk about as the production.

First Edition Metadata

OPD : 2004.01.14 @ 22:44

20070724 : Scaled and relettered.

Edited 20050430 : Replaced the blobbish "suggestion" of the Loki with the ship itself. It wasn't available at the time, so I faked it. Spent more time on the render than I did on the page fixes- wound up stripping the cel shader out and severely tweaking lighting and texturing so I could get something that would render at a useable speed without looking like a ruptured colostomy bag.

Once I had the vehicle fixed and rendered, integrating it didn't take long. While I was working on that, I made a couple of minor tweaks to the con tower and adjusted the lighting and overall color tones on Xand.

I need to do some basic environmental modeling either during The Edit or in between The Edit and chapter four, as we'll be seeing the hanger again and I'd just as soon it didn't look like microwaved crayolas in future occurances. :)

This is one of those pages I'll never be a hundred percent happy with - all of velocity is like that to some degree. I'm willing to "let it slide" with the current corrections simply because there are other pages that need this kind of attention as well - it's not Special (anymore, anyway), so it doesn't get singled out for Special Treatment. Unlike later parts of The Edit.

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Original image:

Original text:

Whoo. Pain. To whit: Production Anxiety (a condition under which the aesthetics I'm striving for outstrip my skills, I see nothing but the flaws, go mental and get bitchy), a serious brain-leadening sugar meltdown (one of these days I'll have medical insurance and we'll find out if it's hypoglycemia, diabetes, a blown $organ or $gland, or whatever), and I vastly overstepped my usual production bounds. And it's done, finally. :D

I actually drew foreground components. And did some serious painting work on the backgrounds- they're still basically mud, but it's a new approach that I know I'll be able to get results with. More lighting and tonal experiments, more dialogue presentation experimentation.

EG, I did too much new stuff at once and my brain blew up.

Time for a short breather before diving into the next page. :D

23:22 < @bda> Xand has a screwdriver in my mouth.
23:22 < @bda> whup.
23:22 < solios> yes.
23:22 < @bda> Her mouth.
23:23 < @bda> You're right about West.
23:23 < @bda> he doesn't look like a mutant.
23:23 < solios> I think it's the hair.
23:24 < solios> fagbot: doot West
23:24 < fagbot> IT'S TIME TO STOP BEING A PUSSY AND START BEING A CRIMINAL.