suction -4-

posted 2009.07.04 at 18:28

A quick and relatively easy adaptation - the biggest hurdle was swapping out Ornix's shirt decal. That's the New Tedium, right there - while I hopefully won't be doing as much rendering work with the next four chapters, almost every shot of Ornix is going to require this kind of work.

While that's going to be fairly reasonable for Transitional Voices, it could become a ROYAL pain for the rest of The Dualist. But hey, it's the last - and most blatant - bit of questionable material. It must go!

I mention this here instead of the previous page for two reasons - first, this one's going to be sitting on top for awhile. Second, it's the first page I did the shirt correction on - this scene was assembled 4-1-2-3. Like every other scene, reworked in order of complexity.

And like every chain of scenes, reworked in order of complexity - Light 1-11 and Suction 1-4, which used to be Suction 1-15, were both largely complete before Recon approached a workable state. As of this writing (2009.06.24.01:11), that scene still needs two complete panels, a lot of photoshop work, and lettering. At present it's a tossup as to which one I'll get to first... but blocking - and blocking HARD - on the remaining Recon graphics work has halted production for far too long. Easier to put type on the last 15 pages of the chapter first, to get the ball rolling again.

Of course, I gotta finish Recon before I can up this bit, so the fact that that scene is now the sticking point ultimately doesn't make much difference to you.

That said, {after Recon is done and these pages are uploaded,} it's time for a break. Typornography and the inevitable tweaks that come with it. Backups. New version of the web site. Covers. Meditate on the second half and what it'll take to produce that, given my situation. Whatever that may be.

There was a seven month gap between the first edition of this chapter and the next. During that time I created what is now the first chapter of the second edition and performed the original round of edits and corrections, so something was happening. The break between Incursion and Expulsion shouldn't be that long.

Almost a full year since work on TV and DCR was put on hold, and around eight months since the second edition got rolling. Not counting Expulsion (the scene and the amount of CG it'll require), there's "only" 158 pages left... with any luck, the second half will roll by much, much faster than the first half has.

First Edition Metadata

OPD : 2004.12.06 @ 01:18

20070730 : Type removal. Previous version here. The type was pretentious, so out it went. FOR PONY!

===================================================

If you checked ATC prior to 6:30 PM on December 05, you missed a page.

I was able to do this hot on the heels of the last page for two simple reasons: The first is that the background elements that the line work sits on top of were taken care of on Friday, and the second is that the line art for suction -14- was done on Saturday. So 05 December was photoshopping the hell out of 14, then line work and photoshop for this page, which I've finished just in time to miss a bus. No complaints- after hauling ass for eleven hours straight I need a break. :P

Generally speaking, I really need a break. Mostly to look into fixing some annoying health issues that have cropped up while pushing myself through Suction... and to generally take a breather and work on some Candy.

Here's the original backdrop without aesthetics matching:

I opted to switch to handwritten type for the final page - in my opinion, it looks better, and it matches previous instances of the rhyme.

So. Now, a short breather. I want to keep downtime as brief as possible... in fact, I don't want any sort of downtime to speak of, really. In the near future I'll be creating some candy, tooling the site to deal with Chapter Zero, and bashing the script together all nice and coherent-like. I aim to start Zero in January, and can't predict how long it'll take to do - I expected to be done with Chapter Three in late October. That didn't happen, which should say something about my temporal perception and ability to guage burn factor, real-world pressures and everything else.

So, until Zero is Done and stuff, this is as far along as ATC technically gets for the time being... and this page will be sitting on Top for at least a few weeks, so enjoy. :D

Hopefully I'll get the cheekbone thing solved before Chapter Four. And the goattee thing. Ornix is off and Thad's all kinds of Wrong, but hey- this is Amateur Hour, kiddies- and these flaws virtually guarantee that I'll be doing something with the front page ASAP. :)

==| Revised, 2004.12.07 |==

Couldn't handle the cheekbone thing, so I fixed it. Not perfect by any stretch, but a damned site nicer nonetheless. See?