TV.4 Production Status Update: Fire rules!

Heh heh heh. Yeah. It rules.

When I produced the cover for Fire it was one of two ATC-related things standing in the way of new pages. The other thing was the script, and at the time it was easier to produce the cover. Around the time the cover went live the weather improved, and for the remainder of April Pittsburgh experienced a very brief spring, lurching from a frigid, sloppy winter into what seems to be a sweltering, soggy summer at high speed. During that time I wrote the script, laid it out. and got all forty pages of the chapter ready for production. There were a lot of steps involved in that process – steps that had previously been performed a page at a time, then a scene at a time. I think this is the first I’ve prepared an entire chapter for production in one go, and as of this writing almost the entire thing is ready for rendering.

20 Pounds of Corned Beef

February was a fabulously unproductive month for ATC. I spent just about all of January building assets for the next chapter of the comic, became even more burned out than usual, and wound up taking most of February off. Or rather I spent most of February’s “free” time in a Tale of Two Wastelands, which is an excellent way to play Fallout 3 on Windows 7. I spent the rest of February juggling half a dozen or so freelance opportunities and obligations, though fortunately they didn’t consume all of my time…

A secret report from within the Build.

January was a productive month. I’m not done with CG prep for the next chapter but I’m a hell of a lot closer than I was at the beginning of the year. The rest of this entry is spoiler heavy and perhaps more importantly contains no screenshots. I’m through the vehicles and on to environments and I’d like the first appearance of those to be on the page as that’s what they’re designed for. That doesn’t prevent me from talking about what I’ve been modeling, though!

Valkyrie: This time it’s hiding in the most terrifying place of all.

I wrote everything after this paragraph, microwaved a burrito, and realized that the post had no title. I then spent more time than is probably healthy struggling to come up with one before checking the blog for guidance. The last post about Transitional Voices referenced Aliens in the title, and this is the next blog post about Transitional Voices and Alien 3 comes after Aliens so there’s the title.

Since my last blog post, development of Transitional Voices chapter four has lurched from Park into a gear somewhere between Drive and Neutral. I’m playing with a new development method for the chapter and while it looks very promising I’ve been focused on indulging my spaceship modeling habit to the exclusion of the script. The script at this point is developed enough that I’ve been able to revise the list of required 3d assets and I’ve been working on the more cognitively harmonious bits of that list instead of, say… the script itself.