Songs from the Fish Mines

Mom was gonna come down and visit today. Then the weather weighed in. The entire state is getting dumped on – the phones are dead, there’s no immediate work on deck. I’m broke and even if I wasn’t, for christmas I promised myself The Wagon for at least a few weeks. This status report is being written at the outset of what will hopefully be the first ALL ATC ALL DAY work session in… uh. Years!

TV.2 (Return To Color) Production Status

All 24 pages have been laid out. Extensive in-page script revisions have been made to several pages; all pages outside of the first rendering block still need to be “framed” and lettered.

Pages 07 through 15 have been rendered. 10 through 15 are pretty much ready for line art, 07 through 09 will need some extensive post-rendering digital work in addition to line art. Renders finished earlier this week, consuming 100% CPU for roughly two weeks. Rendering ops resulted in 342 files totaling 4.07 gigs uncompressed in the PC “00 TV2 Renders” directory. The mac-side data is compressed – LZW for the tiffs and .zip for the 3d files – and weighs in at 2.28g compressed counting the page files.

All work that can be done with entirely existing assets has been done. Pages 2.01 through 2.06 and 2.16 through 2.24 require assets that are either in development or ready for it. Work has started on the environment for 2.16-2.17 though no appreciable progress has been made within the past week or so due to work and render ops. Further development has been pushed back in order to focus on assets required for 2.01 through 2.06. I sunk a good amount of time into modeling work yesterday and plan to get a hell of a lot more done today. I don’t know when (or even if) I’ll have this much time to throw at CG work so I plan to make the most of it.

Properly nerdy details would be pretty spoileriffic at this point. Sufficed to say I’m grinding away on a major asset. CG requirements for TV.2 scene one are such that the best-case estimate for asset development is “January.” If you were reading ATC back in ’07-’08 you know that a CG asset typically takes me 2-6 weeks to develop with a metronomic day job financing production. Three years freelance has complicated my schedule considerably, and it’s worth noting that the asset in question already has a couple of weeks of here-and-there effort invested in it, most of that in 2008 and 2009.

While my phone or inbox could still produce a work-related distraction, hopefully today I will find out just how much I can accomplish with a focused blast of effort.

While doing laundry earlier this week I did some thought exercises to see what ATC production would look like on a regular schedule. If I rolled this thing out weekly instead of as fast as possible, I’d have a total of seventeen weeks from GO! to develop the assets required for the back end of the chapter, and an additional seven weeks to finalize the TV.3 script and start work on layouts and assets. While production almost certainly won’t go down this way, it remains a possibility… and it wouldn’t surprise me if 24 pages wound up taking six months to produce from GO!. Heck, this thing’s already been in some stage of development since September. Of 2008.

Back to the fish mines!

Fuck, he knows Latin! He knows a dead language! Run!

The world hasn’t ended, but the presence of Latin in The Dualist has! The QAR got a minor-for-effort major-for-continuity edit this afternoon. See the changelog for a list of edited pages.

This edit is in support of tweaks being made to the QAR for Transitional Voices. It was the only bit of non-English In Spaaaaaaaace and now it’s toast, which eliminates a pretty glaring continuity problem.

Production status update, 20121219

Today’s the first day I’ve had a good-sized chunk of “me” time in a couple of weeks. Well, “me” time that isn’t 4am exhausted wind-down Fallout: New Vegas time. Lots of client work, now down to waiting on payments, contracts, and communications. Wednesday seems a natural lull for this sort of thing – over the course of 2012 rather a lot of comic work got done on Wednesdays.

In previous TV blog posts I wrote about the notion of rendering ahead as a means of rectifying a complex schedule with comics production and CG requirements and so forth. I’ve been working ahead for quite awhile – many pages of DCR.5 were rendered for weeks before I caught up on line art, but that was a linear progression. This is the first time I’ve jumped ahead to render ahead. As of yesterday afternoon, six pages of TV.2 have been rendered and are ready for line art. That’s a quarter of the chapter – and it happens to be (roughly) the second quarter. The environment was built in 2008, the script was solid (since revised to be solider), layouts were done, reference dummies popped into existence easily enough, and the whole mess – 38 panels sum total – took roughly nine days to render. The Daedalus rec area and bridge are absolute pigs – big files, lots of geometry, a crapload of high resolution texture maps, lots of lights set up back when I was still figuring out photometrics and mental ray and all that. Future environments will render faster.

So, six pages are rendered and ready for line art preparation and script tweaks and so forth. I may re-render a panel or two, though I probably won’t – a few shots look a bit rough with the reference objects in place, but that’s almost entirely due to shaders and specularity and I can totally ignore or improve on that when things get to line art. The rough spots I’m thinking of are towards the middle of the scene, so when the pages finally do get into production I should have the time to re-render a panel or two if it turns out things are sub-optimal.

There are two or three (possibly two and a half) more pages I can render with existing assets, and two environments to re-light. These bits will likely be done before any substantial progress is made on assets for the first six pages of the chapter. I’ve done a bit of modeling work for one of the last two scenes – a solid foundation, but the assets need a lot more work before they’ll be ready for primetime. Hopefully I’ll have more time for 3d work over the next couple of weeks.

Oh, and I managed to lay out two whole pages of the last scene while doing laundry last week.

Quite a bit of work has been done over the past couple of weeks, though you won’t see any of it for a couple of months. When pages do start showing up, they’re set to hit at a steady, predictable, no-cg-holdups-just-drawing pace.

All told. Now to get the rest of today’s to-do list taken care of!

Poopsketcher

13:02 < solios> I sketched out templar provisional hq while taking a shit
13:03 < solios> seemed an optimal use of time and resources (and poop)
13:03 < solios> (I sketched it with a pen.)
13:08 < xeno__m> poopsketcher
13:12 < solios> >.>
14:18 < mdxi> Your search – poopsketcher – did not match any documents
14:18 < mdxi> haven’t seen that happen in a while
14:18 < solios> O_o
14:18 < mdxi> “Did you mean: poop catcher”
14:18 < mdxi> NO MOST CERTAINLY NOT

{Pre-}Production status update, 20121206

I’m fine with talking obliquely about spoilers with regards to TV.2 – it’s a transitional chapter, full of a lot of fairly important details but relatively light on surprises. The real fun happens in TV.3 and TV.4 and I intend to remain tight-lipped about the back half of the book.

Last night I created layouts and script revisions for the core of TV.2. A little bit ago I scanned in those parts of the workbook and after I finish this I’ll get a few pages scripted and guttered. I intend to start production renders for pages ten through fifteen on Friday or Saturday. If the calculations based on initial test renders are accurate those six pages will take the rest of the month to render. Most of the pages are five or six panels, one is currently fourteen – less if I can figure out a way to cut it down while conveying the same information. A production-grade test render of an area roughly 1/3 of a page in size took six hours earlier this week – while not all panels are going to take that long to render, my (very) rough estimate is two big panels a day, tops. During which I’ll need non-PC things to do. Right now that’s a good-sized list, very little of it ATC-related.

Pages six through seventeen now have layouts or revised layouts and script or revised script. Pages seven through fifteen have environments and I plan to start rendering with page ten within the next couple of days. The first Daedalus scene is just about ready to render – after yesterday’s crash course in Character Studio I flirted with the idea of upgrading the reference dummies before starting production but after some thought I ultimately decided against it – with a little bit of effort I can slam these pages into production now, and that’s kind of the point. I’d sooner save biped revisions for later; possibly the second Daedalus scene or in TV.3. Hell, I’m moving forward with the first Daedalus scene precisely because the requirements are relatively minimal. Upgrading the biped now would be counter-productive – while my test rig showed obvious benefits to upgrading, the idea behind rolling ahead on renders now is minimal setup work, grinding through a CPU-hogging scene while I’m focused on other things. Which I need to be focused on, which biped upgrades would take focus from.

So. The first major chunk of the chapter will be produced with existing methods, despite their inefficiencies – CG production time needs to be focused on asset creation for the time being. Objects that’ll be CG in finished pages regardless – vehicles and environments.

13 pages featuring the Daedalus (inside and out), three pages using other existing environments. Eight pages from scratch or with minimal existing assets, six of those at the front of the chapter. “Go!” layouts and script for 12 pages, “Start!” script and layouts for five pages, “Start!” script and no layouts yet for the seven pages at the end.

Still on track for pages in January; apparently still on track for the pages to flow regularly once the first five are in order. TV.2 is shaping up to be an exercise in long-term planning. It’s been on the shelf for almost five years – how couldn’t it be?

Let’s get technical.

TV.1 page files are 2250×3375 at 365 dpi and cleanly reduce to 600×900. The pages of The Dualist and TV.1 were prepped without hardcopy gutters and still need to be expanded and forked to CMYK for hardcopy. Panel max width is 2190.

Page files from DCR.2 onward are 3300×5040 at 480 dpi with a “live” area of 2880×4320 and a web select area of 2944×4417 that reduces to 600×900. Panel max width is 2848. Grayscale pages are immediately ready for hardcopy. Finished pages are reduced to webscale and web gutters with a photoshop action. I’m not going back to TV.1 templates for TV.2 – I’m converting DCR.2-5 templates to RGB with black gutters and moving on at the current production resolution.

DCR.2-5 dialogue was 5.16pt with a leading of 6.09pt. TV.2 dialogue is provisionally set for 5.25pt with a leading of 6.5. TV.1 was 5pt with a leading of 6.58pt; this upsamples to 7.52pt with a leading of 8.61pt when scaled to the same size as the working TV.2 template file. So dialogue is technically going down in size between TV.1 and TV.2, unchanged from DCR.5. Dialogue has used rectangles with a 10px radius and minimum four pixel thickness since forever – I don’t plan on changing that with this revision of the template.

Existing draft of script (completed a couple of months ago) transcribed to RTF with a few changes. Page count is 24. Some dense for dialogue, some sparse. Pages will doubtless be expanded between draft and web publication. Ten pages have provisional layouts – some solid, some sketchy – scanned this afternoon in parallel with transcription. Workbook assembled in InDesign; hardcopy completed at 23:25. Fourteen pages need layouts, a few of the existing layouts may be refined.

24 page directories were created in the TV 02 Chapter Two – Water directory on 26 November, populated with {$pagenumber}l and {$pagenumber}z sub-directories. Adjusted template detailed above and blank commentary files were populated to those directories this afternoon. Pages will be provisionally blocked off for layouts when the full script is thumbnailed. Page seventeen is technically already laid out; just needs captions.

Environment assets required for pages 7-15 already exist. 1-6 and cover need assets, 16-17 need assets, environmental assets are required for 18-24, though the majority of the real estate already exists. 16-17 should be fairly straightforward; the rest are more complicated. Depending on workload, schedule and layout development there’s a possibility that rendering work may begin on 7-15 (or at least 10-15) before assets for 1-6 are complete, as asset development requires hours of sustained attention per day over a period of several days or weeks and rendering work requires a few minutes of setup and checking work per panel then it’s Hurry Up And Wait. If I had layouts and updated reference dummies I could actually start firing those off right now. In fact I should probably proceed in this direction, as the Daedalus interiors are absolute pigs and took forever to render at 365.

That doesn’t mean I’ll start rendering today, of course. Part of the move forward with TV.2 is higher-detailed positional assets (3d bipeds), adding boots and collars and the like to get a better idea of perspective and more importantly to throw accurate bounce lighting so the 2d assets fit cleanly into the scene. This came off fairly well in TV.1. The technique was improved considerably over the course of DCR though with grayscale I didn’t have to match color. I intend to improve on that in TV.2. Boots and collars and boobs – bolt-on cantaloups will be a thing of the past. West’s hard-topped cap will be a proper soft-cover if it kills me. I can prep the dummies without layouts but I can’t put them to proper use until they exist, so layouts and dummy prep need to be high priorities over the next week or two.

As an almost entirely dedicated work session today has gone exceptionally well. I’d keep plodding along, but my stated mission – script and page template preparation – is complete and I need to do some finishing work on a client project tonight if I’m to have a hope in heck of paying rent this week. I’m not sure how my schedule for December is going to shake out but at the moment it looks like weekdays split between different types of client work with weekends hopefully dedicated to ATC. In this context, prioritizing layouts and positional assets makes a lot of sense, as with a bit of up-front work I’ll have something to roll with before the end of the month. The next page is not the production goal – Transitional Voices Chapter Two in its entirety is the production goal. So “skipping ahead” isn’t really skipping ahead – it’s potentially making the best practical use of available time.

I do that a lot with ATC. Write when I’m creative, work when I’m not. The TV.2 draft was generated this summer, then put on hold for Observer Effect. Today it’s been transcribed and prepared for full layouts and digital work, and the page directory structure and templates have been created. A lot of boring work, a lot of necessary work, and I’ve grown to greatly prefer doing it all at once instead of on an as-need basis. Less so with line art, as it requires more attention and more than a page or two of pencilling and inking causes a great deal of physical strain.

Copious amounts of thinking out loud, which ultimately adds up to this: when production finally starts, Daedalus interior scenes should hopefully roll out faster than the rest of the chapter. As Daedalus scenes account for 58% of the chapter, this bodes well for actual production pace of TV.2.

TV.2 Back in Pre-Production!

The TV.2 script hit a solid first-revision draft back in August. Then Observer Effect happened. Ten pages in roughly ten weeks isn’t bad, considering everything else that’s been going on in my life. The story is stronger for it, though TV.2 development was put on hold while that sequence came into being.

For the time being ATC is done with grayscale. The story is now moving chronologically forward for the first time since July of 2008. The next page will be the TV.2 cover, which requires the same assets and environment as the first six pages of the installment. Asset and script development will resume this week – the script after a brief hiatus, assets after an extensive period of time off. The key asset of TV.2 scene one is roughly 80% complete for geometry and has been since late 2009.

At present the plan is to get the TV.2 script finished and laid out before the end of the year, and to get the initial assets ready to go within the same period. All of this is subject to work and scheduling issues, though the script and assets are far enough along that this may be achievable even if things get totally bent out of shape.

Development may be punctuated by blog posts the way DCR.5 was.

I have some work-work to deal with first and I’m still recovering from The Flu From Hell, so I don’t expect to make any real progress this week. I do plan to update the blog on a fairly regular basis, though – TV.2 (hopefully) won’t suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Observer Effect production timeline

Observer Effect 4 and 5 are in production hell at the moment – 24 panels total, 27 if I count full-panel sound effects that are already complete. The pages are scripted, blocked out, ready for CG, and the major 3d asset for both pages has been acquired, tweaked and textured. That leaves environments – which, as the pages take place over the span of a year, are fairly excessive. As are the line art requirements.

Getting these pages done is going to take awhile – four different environments and a good solid mix of rendering and digital painting plus a lot of drawing (and cleanup and shading). The pages are a great example of information density and after the first page of OE are the highlight of the installment.

Fortunately, OE.6 and 7 are almost the complete reverse of OE.4 and 5 – the line art requirements for these two pages are minimal and the environments have been complete for a couple of weeks now. The trick with this vignette is the script – the first draft was meh, the second draft doesn’t fit the rest of the installment, and I haven’t been in the writing zone in a couple of weeks. As 6 and 7 are effectively narrative-over-images, the visuals can be produced before the script and can Sit There until applicable words show up.

8-10 are scripted and laid out on paper, with no digital production as yet. While the line art is on the dense side, production requirements aren’t as stringent as 4 and 5 so when these pages are on deck they should come together in short order.

At this point the plan is to get 4 and 5 done and posted this month, 6 and 7 visually produced this month and posted whenever the script solidifies (hopefully also this month), with 8-10 going up in November. Production time estimates are based on my workload over the past couple of weeks and my projected workload for the next month or so – something that may very well go straight out the window. If work does step it up, the revised goal is to get OE out the door by the end of the year. That’s not ideal but it is doable!

Pushin Forward Back

This post is named after the Temple of the Dog track that The X never plays. I think I’ve heard it once on college radio. In the mid 1990s.

It’s an appropriate title for two reasons – first, as detailed in an amendment to the current site notes, I’ve overhauled all comic navigation. It’s presently filtered to previous/next between story pages, pushing covers aside to favor the presentation of a seamless narrative. That was a bit of a push, forward.

Second, Return To Color (Transitional Voices chapter two) has been pushed back while I focus on Observer Effect, which should take a couple of months to produce. Hopefully less. I’m moving forward with new pages, but I’m also moving forward back in the sense that the current block of work takes place before Dead City Radio.

While Observer Effect will end with a lead-in to DCR, it isn’t a straight-up DCR prologue – it’s an ATC prologue. It sets the tone for Templar actions on earth and if it comes out as intended it will provide some context for the actions of John West, Raven Lockheart, Beef Knuckleback, and Thad & Ornix. It’ll also set up some of the events of DCR.1, and hopefully set the tone for DCR in a way that DCR.1 doesn’t.

I don’t have a timetable for OE at present – I know it’ll be ten pages if I can’t cut it to eight, I know it’ll need to match up to DCR.1, I know pretty much what I’m doing for pages two and three and 7-10, and I’m stuck on four and five. OE covers two years in ten pages – the WGP briefing got the first page, at present Jason gets three, and the remainder will be composed of two page scenes that will each address something relevant to the existing books.

The objective of Observer Effect is to answer the question “What’s this thing about?” in a fashion that will satisfy long-time readers without confusing new readers. It’s also a chance to fiddle with some CG I won’t get a chance to otherwise and an excuse to see what the cast looks like in the mid 90s. It also also puts modern art in front of DCR.1, and that’s a good thing!

Also also also. With OE in production, the new site is now very nearly at full operating capacity. It won’t be Go For Real until TV.2.1 is on the front page, but as of this morning all planned sections are active… which is more than I can say for previous versions of the site.

Dopping was was (not was).

was

As detailed in the DCR changelog – xeno did a read and caught a few typos that slipped through my August editing pass.

No major alterations, fortunately!

Photo by xeno.

< mrs_xeno> Well jeeze, he didn’t need to tear it out and leave it on our porch…

DCR now 144, still 138 actual. Shiny!

atc_c_000_temp_Woot, woohoo, yay, etcetera and so forth. It’s not the final cover, but it’s done, it’s up, all of the necessary template rewiring has been done (I think!), and – most importantly! – for a temp cover, it looks pretty good!

I have a fairly good idea as to what I want for the “proper” cover – I just don’t have the time for it, and won’t for quite awhile. I also have plans to consult with a professional, so my plans could easily be scrapped and replaced with Awesome{r}.

Work complete, for the time being. Tomorrow? Back to work-work. Stuff’s building up on me, and while I’m relieved to have the site brought up to spec and to have DCR technically complete, ATC ate a lot more of the last week or so than I would have liked, and now I get to play catch-up.

Though before I start with that, I’m taking the rest of the night off. For once!

The next major update will hopefully be the launch of the “New Reader” section – the plan for that is mid to late September. In the meantime, enjoy the new site – and keep an eye out for Universe updates!

TV.2, Website headspace, Continuity

I finished the first modern draft of the TV.2 script last night. Over the course of getting that generated some actionable material for TV.4 fell out. Last night’s session was pretty much exactly what was required for production – the script was generated with layouts, which gives me a solid idea as to TV.2’s early CG requirements. Major geometry already exists – to get this thing going I’ll be finishing assets that are a few years old, rather than starting fresh. There’s still a hell of a lot of work to do but the important thing is that the vast majority of the script takes place in existing environments. The big hangups are the first six pages and the last six pages.

I’m going to sit on the script for a bit before I transcribe it and start cutting it up for pages, revising it, getting an idea of the final page count, etc. I plan to continue developing the production framework that gelled into place with DCR.3 – typed script, workbook, layouts, revisions, etceteras. TV.2 will officially start production when the script is finalized – at this point I’d like to have things ready to go in October. Five weeks may sound like a long time but I won’t be slacking off – that’s five weeks to bust out a cover for DCR, update the covers for The Dualist, and oh yeah… redo the website.

That last one is going to be a bit of a time sink. I plan to stick closely to the current look and feel, evolving layout, functionality and CSS to fit with where my head’s at these days. I’m also going to burn down the Universe again and cook it up fresh – more thorough, more focused, and – most importantly – more integrated. At this point I have a few ideas about how to tie Universe entries in with tag search and I’m going to explore that thoroughly. I’m probably also going to fork the Cast into its own menu item – still part of the Universe but easier to get to.

Another goal is to make all chapters of all books quickly accessible – at this point how that works out is going to depend on what I wind up doing with the left-hand menu. If that continues to handle like it does now then I’ll go with a “site map” footer. If I go in a different direction with the main menu then the footer will likely retain some semblance of its present shape.

Also on deck – CSS and template support for advertising. I’ll cook it into the build and keep it disabled until I’m ready to roll with it. It’s something that’s been on the back burner for years and now that fourteen chapters of ATC can be read coherently it’s time to start buying ad space on other comics, and allowing ads for other webcomics onto ATC.

Along those lines, there’ll be a new menu option – currently “Reading List” in my head – which is planned to be a comprehensive list of comics and support sites that I frequent.

Also under consideration is a “New Readers” menu item – currently About serves an acclimation function, though the current About section reads like a massive wank. I’m thinking along the lines of Sam and Fuzzy‘s New Reader page – though ATC being ATC, what I have in mind is a short “bootstrap” comic that would cover certain key elements of backstory before lobbing the reader into Dead City Radio. I drafted a small part of it this weekend and the first bit reads great – whether I fully develop it or not depends on a number of factors. At present it’s Under Consideration and not something I consider a requirement for a site launch… though the more I think on it, the better it “feels.”

Aaaand. What prompted this blog post, actually. Wrapping a new TV.2 script draft that’s FULL OF SPACE PORN would have gotten a mention regardless – this generalized ramble was prompted by the fact that the continuity pass mentioned previously is functionally complete. I’ve redacted the story pages of all fourteen chapters (and the bookends of The Dualist) and found relatively few genuine continuity errors – most of the effort was focused on smoothing out some clunkiness. Editing is presently down to replacing the logo on the covers of The Dualist, and removing book numbers.

Yeah, I’m “refactoring” the books. By the time the website overhaul is complete DCR will be book one, The Dualist will be book two, and Transitional Voices will be book three. Book numbering will be dropped from the cover mockups – and probably from the website. That may create some dissonance with page metadata, but if I’m going to start buying ad space and hoping for eyeballs, I’d rather give a new reader the impression that the whole thing starts with DCR.1. Which it does.

So. Gear-shift in progress. New site in September or October, I hope!

Vizcon, changelogs, and the continuity pass.

I’ve created changelogs for DCR, The Dualist, and Transitional Voices. Major edits will be reported on these pages, and I plan to feature the pages themselves more prominently in the next version of the website.

I don’t expect to find much to poke at when I do the continuity read-through. This thing has been through the wringer more times than The Star Wars and by now all of the major issues have been resolved. The only real teeth-grinder will be expanding the gutters and creating CMYK forks of the Dualist and TV.1 pages, and that’s not a web issue – that’s a print issue. That’s a good problem.

There are three phases planned for the continuity pass, as follows:

Alllmost there…

DCR 5.20 is up, which wraps production of DCR.5 and completes DCR as a story. Web-completes it, anyway – there’s a couple of scenes I’d like to do for hardcopy but given the urge to get Transitional Voices back into production as soon as possible it’s safe to say that DCR won’t get the same sort of “fleshing out” that added a considerable amount of production time to The Dualist.

DCR does need a cover, however. The other two books started with Book and Chapter One covers. DCR’s never had one – initially an artifact of the story beginning life as a comic strip, I decided at some point along the way that I’d start thinking about a cover when the thing was done.

And it is!

I still need to do an editing pass, mind you. But I’m doing some sort of cover thing first, and I’ll retcon it into place. I managed to wrap the story ahead of my August 31 deadline – hopefully I’ll be able to put the finishing touch on it before that day passes!

TV.2 in Pre-Production.

I’ve been noodling around with iterations of outlines for a few months now. Given the results of last night’s pre-Curiosity development session I think I can comfortably state that after four years on the shelf, Transitional Voices is back in development. The basic outline for the story hasn’t changed, and that’s made burning it down to the skeleton and rebuilding it from scratch less of a challenge.

While development is still hit and miss, most of what I generated last night I consider Good, and at least one bit is In The Script for sure. I plan to continue evolving the DCR development model – script, layouts, assets, production and thorough documentation. I also plan to finish DCR, make the DCR and Dualist continuity passes, and overhaul the site before production on TV resumes in earnest. Script development is GO and will continue to be GO until I’ve got something to work with. After four years off it’s less a question of where things are going (that hasn’t changed) and more a question of how to get there efficiently, while doing things that haven’t been done with the other two books.

I could probably crunch out a viable script for TV.2 in a week – it has been percolating for awhile. I don’t actually need that script for at least a couple of months, so for the time being wrapping up DCR is the priority.

Message ends!

30 Days of Nights

I just finished primary assembly of pages 5.15 and 5.16. I penciled and inked them Sunday, cleaned the line art up yesterday, and spent a chunk of the afternoon on flat colors, assembly, and effects. I will be spending the rest of the day on non-comic stuff, and most of the rest of the week as well.

With the stated deadline of August 31 looming,* as of this writing six pages remain. Of these, two are ready for shading – so that’ll be four pages remaining by the end of this coming weekend. One of the four has been rendered and is ready for line art. Of the remaining three one has all necessary 3d assets and the other two require some modeling work to get into production.

In short, things are thing. While the situation is looking positive it’s far too early to declare victory – never underestimate the ability of a Democrat to lose an election, and never underestimate the ability of a deadline to slip into oblivion!

So. At least two pages this week or weekend. I hope. Then 5.17 ASAP, then the rest as time allows.

All told.

Postscript : The post title is a play on the franchise. It also indicates the time period in which work will likely take place, and how much time I have between now and the deadline – technically thirty-one days. Of nights. If I’m going to get this thing done I’m going to have to give up my wind-down period (roughly 3-5 am) to do it.

* A month is a good-sized chunk of time until you hit your late 20s. Get into your 30s and a month contains roughly the same amount of perceived time as a week of high school.

Birthdanniversary!

ATC is nine today.

To celebrate, I’ve posted production pages 515 through 519 in one block, timestamped 16:20. In part because that’s when I hit “post” on all of them. In part because 4:20, dude.

That’s pages five hundred and fifteen through five hundred and nineteen, as opposed to DCR chapter five pages fifteen through nineteen. Those… are a few weeks (or months) away at this point.

Now… back to work!

Go, but carefully. This pit is slow.

DCR.5 primary assets are 90% complete as of this writing. I still have some plot- and cover-critical assets to develop – these don’t otherwise appear until a few pages into the chapter, so I’ve taken the {!un}usual step of starting rendering work. At the moment, pages 5.01, 5.02 and 5.03 have been rendered and are ready for line art, and panel one of 5.04 is 89.3% of the way through the reference render. I don’t need the cover assets until 5.05, so there’ll be a natural production break after the renders for 5.04 have been generated.

I haven’t drawn any of the rendered pages yet – my head has been elsewhere with Work-work, I have other drawing obligations, and I’m mentally hung up on starting work on a chapter that doesn’t have a cover. So, what’s probably going to happen is this:

I’ll render 5.04, not work on the comic for a few days, prep the assets required for 5.05-5.17 and the cover, render the cover, then draw the cover and get it prepped while 5.05 through 5.whatever are rendering. Either the cover will go up and a few pages will follow in a batch allotment a few days or weeks after that, or the cover and the first batch of pages will hit all at once. I like working and posting in batches – drawing and processing a few pages in parallel makes much better use of my time, and as to posting them… I know there are a few readers who’d prefer regular updates, but I don’t live that kind of life and this isn’t that kind of comic. If I could clockwork it I would – as it stands, I’m uploading pages as soon as I consider them finished. I’d rather produce DCR.5 as four or five (probably six or eight) big updates as opposed to 20 individual page dumps.

So. Pages are in the pipeline, though it’ll be at least a week before any of them are ready to post. Probably two or three, as I want to get the cover done first and a couple of pages in the first batch are fairly complex.

All told!

Test Department

Spoiler-heavy screenshot of various DCR.5 development efforts below the fold. The environment geometry is pretty much done – I need to do some more work on textures and tweak the lights a bit more. Things are shaping up nicely. Time permitting, the environment and character reference props should be done within the next week, with production renders to follow.