Bits You Won't See For Quite Awhile continue to build up.

II has been swatted, and I've finished processing and inserting the ten new panels that augment the existing pages of what will eventually be Chapter Seven. I've started CG work on the bit of geometry I'll need for two of the ten remaining pages, and I've been doing some here-and-there work on the Big CG that's holding up the other eight.

Unless I catch a visual gaffe during future lettering, this thing is done for visual re-processing.

Down to the rewrite, new pages, and new material.

Logjams include but are not limited to:

1. Ten pages of new stuff. Eight to launch the Back Four, two to finish Chapter Seven.

2. 3d bits for said, which are also needed to progress Dead City Radio. DCR needs more than that, but it's been needing the more than that and these bits since this time last year, so knocking the DCR CG to-do down to two (enormous) items will make the idea of progressing it a lot less... icky. Processing the panel inserts for the existing chapter seven pages was a cinch - the modeling was already done. This won't be as easy.... but the required material is much more significant. We're not talking a few pipes and a crank. We're talking the story equivalent of System Level bits.

3. Writing. I've chewed on a lot of plot stuff over the past few weeks, but Chapter Five isn't on that list. I have a feeling that given my work flow, my money flow, my life in general... this will probably be the last thing knocked off the immediate TDL. Writing's the thing I do when computers are out of reach - and being cripplingly, criminally destitute means no going out... which means the keyboard remains closer than the pen. Which means photoshop etc. take priority over writing.

Fortunately, the back half is more cleanup and tweaking than it is Starting Over. It's the same amount of work, mind you - but creatively, reading an old scene and rewording it for The Now is a lot easier than throwing out an old steamer and replacing it with something that fits. I've learned a thing or two about retroscripting with the first half.... though maybe not in the Stan Lee sense of the term- stylistically, I've no Claremontian Prose Obelisks to fall back on.

4. Covers. Progress on the back four has been so rapid that I'm now questioning the idea of chapter covers. I've been questioning them for awhile, really - I generated the backgrounds for the first four quickly enough... as planned, I still have seven (eight if you count TV) backgrounds to figure out, and - counting those - nine that need art. I could cheap out and cut that to one. The thought of it, it's tempting. Reduction of workload, elimination of nonessential material, etc. No ideas for any of those seven (eight) given the pattern I've established for the first four. Not a good sign.

Well... ideas. But they all involve a style shift - one that implies either a rework of existing covers (see the previous blog post with the previews) or some clear indicator that Change Is Merited. II does that all by itself, really... so it's a question of choice of II cover, and manufacture of 5-8 backs. And linework, etc.

The big icky is that in terms of where things are and how I'll likely be able to work on them, I'd vastly prefer to bust this thing out, then do the covers. Which is a massive, massive departure from How Things Have Been Done.

You'd think the repeated cover drafts would have been a clear indicator, but it's only now - when I've decided that drawing will be involved - that I start to rethink production priorities.

I needs me a drafting table.

Something er-go-nomic.

After finishing (most of) my pre-formatting run through The Dualist, I figured I'd take out the next item on the photoshop To Do list - fixing Ornix's shirt in the existing pages of Transitional Voices.

The old shirt decal appeared in 24 pages total, of which Earth -8- was the stinker. The rest went quietly. Quietly enough to be done in one night.

With the exception of one remaining page* of the first edition of The Dualist, this means all of the graphics re-work is complete, and TV is now visually consistent with The Dualist. At present, only two major objectives remain - ten new pages of The Dualist (and one page to fix), and the second edition rewrite. That will be followed by a rewrite of TV.1, and, eventually, new pages.

* I've been putting that one off for awhile. I might knock it off my list tonight, just to have it over and done with... adapt the new pages to it, instead of the other way around.

One page of TD2E left to pre-format. A good-sized chunk now need new panels and there's ten new pages to create, but hey- one page left to pre-format.

That's the "II" I've mentioned previously.

Touched c1 of Transitional Voices for the first time in Awhile tonight - knocked the Ornix Shirt Fixes down to one. One. Page, that is. Several panels of one page.

One that's been really strangely assembled, even by my standards.

So, one of each. Not counting the rewrite TV will need - as I'm all about getting the brute photoshop out of the way now, that bit can wait.

Will upload the new TV pages as soon as the last one is fixed.

Photoshop gruntwork is almost done; writing gruntwork is on deck. So much gruntwork.

As for the "three" implied in the title - huge whopping chunks of my internet have caught the lame tonight. Or this past week. Or... since Sunday. No idea how to debug and pretty sure the problem isn't on my end.

Also, the number of pages that still need to be pre-formatted.

That's (still) the one page of chapter four, and all of chapter six.

The rest is in the bag and ready for dialogue.

All the remaining holdups (texturing, the eight pages of Expulsion, etc) that I've blogged about previously still need to be dealt with. But hey, 111 out of 158 pages pre-formatted.

That's something to be happy about!

It's time for numbers!

166 : number of pages remaining (not counting covers and supplemental material)
08 : number of pages that are Brand New For Sure.
158 : number of pages remaining in the First Edition.

That 158? That's the important part. For this post, anyway.

73 : number of pages pre-formatted as of this post.
85 : number of pages that still need to be pre-formatted.

Pre-formatting in this case means that the page has been transferred from the first edition 3:4 aspect ratio to the second edition 6:9. So far this has largely been a matter of cropping and scaling, though there's also been a good amount of "raising the roof" (that is, extending the sky or digging up the original 3d file and over-rendering the top of it to fill space), a few replacement renders, and some minor photoshop cleanup.

While I could go nuts and spend time scrubbing every page, I've kept the amount of photoshop editing as minimal as possible, restricting myself to Ornix's shirt and the most egregious of otherwise-unrepairable panels. I did more cleanup work for any three pages of the first two chapters than I have for the last 73 pages I've crunched. Which is how I've managed to pre-format 73 pages in a fortnight.

I call it "pre-formatting" instead of "formatting" for one simple reason - I don't know if these pages have been formatted or not, and I won't know until I've started to lay down the dialogue. As no part of Expulsion (the last four chapters) has been re-written yet, any one of these pages could be a potential land mine - I may have to rework panels, pages, maybe even scenes. So I'm not formatting - I'm pre-formatting. Odds are most of these pages won't need to be touched - but some of them probably will.

Those 73 pages? I ignored the first page of Chapter Four and have been going from there. Hunt and peck, bits and pieces, here and there. Working my way through some easy pages, some tough pages, some time consuming pages, then some easy pages again. With the one exception, all of Chapters Five and Six have been pre-formatted. Six is the short one (22 pages!), which is why the number is 73 and not, say... 79 - a number I hope to hit tonight or tomorrow. The halfway point on pre-formatting.

I'm probably tackling chapter Eight next. It's straightforward and like chapter Seven will require a good amount of rendering correction and a good amount of Ornix Shirt Replacement. I'm heading for Eight instead of Seven in order to buy time for the PC components to arrive - Seven is going to be a problem chapter. While Eight will certainly have its hurdles, the story is solid and the corrections will be aesthetic. Roof raising, mostly.

Seven is a different animal. The first sub-scene ("insertion") will be a straight-forward pre-format. The rest of the chapter... not so much. I'm going to be adding stuff. Right now I'm thinking a couple of pages and several panels to pages - the former to give the story the Crazy Visual Near-Climax that it completely lacks, and the latter to flesh out a narrative thread - a point b - that is implied to exist but that as yet does not. Those of you who read my IRC prattling know what I'm talking about - if this thing is new to you than I'm not going to spoil it for you.

So Eight is straight forward and the first third of Seven is as well. I'm going to bust those bits out as fast as I can. The goal here is to get as much of the second edition pre-formatted as possible, so that when pages start showing up again they'll be doing so en masse. This is the boring part - final tweaks and laying down the type is much more enjoyable.

I've been working like this for awhile now - stripping pages, pre-formatting them, cleaning them up, then adding the dialogue. Until now I've been doing it a scene at a time, dragging my feet on each little bit, stumbling around, letting the rewrite hold me up. Things have changed a bit - the order of operations at this point in time is to get as much of what I can do done as fast as I can do it. Any mistakes made now can be fixed when the page comes 'round to dialogue.

Of the remaining 85 pages, I can pre-format 51 of them now without having to worry about adding panels or pages. Adding pages mucks up the numbering something fierce.

So that's what I'm going to do. That's where my head is right now.

Later for everything else.

Sitrep:

1. Everything I've threatened previously. The new version of the website, mainly - no progress on that front. Yet. I figure I'll get to it when Expulsion is closer to being actualized.

2. "Expulsion" has been re-scripted and laid out. At eight pages or so, it's going to be lot of work.* Still gotta do texture mapping (a lot of work for three shots), environment development, etc. See 4. for why this isn't going anywhere right now. Chapter covers have stalled out - that has nothing to do with 4 and more to do with the fact that 3 is a heck of a lot easier to work on at the moment.

3. Of the 48 pages of Chapter Five, 22 have been pre-prepped. Some new renders and cleanup work, the usual reformatting, all ready for dialogue. So whenever Expulsion is finished, there'll be a BIG load of pages following.

4. The PC I've been using for 3d work kicked the bucket. It works intermittently - signs point to repeated processor overheating. I could fix it, but it's a loaner and it's a P4 2.4 with 2 gigs of ram. I'm presently doing rendering work in a VM on my primary machine. While it works fairly well, there are some major quirks that prevent it from being a viable texturing solution. I've already ordered the first few parts for the replacement PC, which will be a quad-core something or other with comparatively kick-ass specs. The holdup, as always, is finances. Barring a massive windfall or a sudden transformation into a life form that doesn't need to eat, we're looking at a good six to eight weeks before I have all the components.

So, there it is. Nothing hits the website until the PC problem is solved, though that hasn't stopped work on reformatting. With any luck I'll have all of four and a good chunk of five reformatted and ready for dialogue (and maybe actually dialogued) by the time the all of the parts are in.

It may not look like it, but work is being done. Expect another month or two of silence, followed by a massive, massive update.

* The basics are pretty basic on paper, but are going to be difficult to adequately actualize. Fortunately the scene will be very good practice for a variety of techniques I'll need to master for Water and everything that follows. The more of TD2E 5-8 I can get bagged in the meantime, the smaller the gap between Expulsion and New Story Pages.