Panel seven kind of makes a joke out of panel one of this page, doesn’t it?
Things that can only be seen at 200x magnification in photoshop (or possibly with a magnifying glass on hardcopy): The totally faded out labels on the Mark 21 Jump Seats (a vicious play on words if ever there was), and the movie ‘BiCheese: The Nacho Paradox” (BiCheese: The Nacho Pa-[raven’s hand]) on the starboard comms screen.
Technically, the cameras on all the top monitors (and on the comms station) started life in the bananaphone…. and this is the second page to make use of dummy-assisted shadow casting. The first was the previous page, but I was so shot when I posted it that I could barely manage an elipsis, let alone a coherent explanation of what that is and how it impacts the renders.
Long story short, Mental Ray is a lot harder to “shadowmatch” than Scanline renders ever were. And I get the perspective of the characters kind of correct and their positions completely correct by using articulated “woodies” in the scene. So now instead of doing crap quality “ref” renders to see how the shadows are going to fall, I’m now doing an additional render of the scene at its target quality with the dummies “on,” throwing shadows but invisible to the camera. That render is then dropped over the actual render and photoshopped a bit so the shadows look like they’re cast by organic shapes instead of the dummies. It sounds like a hassle (and it is), but it’s a lot easier and prettier than Ye Olde hamhanded methods.
Not that I’m not looking forward to getting back to those as soon as possible – fortunately, I only have to deal with this lighting solution for a good chunk of the next page. After that, it’ll be a long time (in terms of production, not story) before I’ll have to deal with atmosphere again.
Woot.
00:06 < Slip> hah @ dyslexic raven
00:07 < solios> hm?
00:07 < Slip> “safty” [fixed typo in panel two]
00:09 < solios> schwups.
00:10 * solios fixes
00:11 < Slip> um
00:11 < Slip> i thought raven was supposed to be dyslexic as she gets corrected in the next panel
00:12 < Slip> at least that’s how i’ve seen the way you put safety into ” on the next panel
00:13 < solios> it’s in quotes because thad trusts raven’s idea of safety about as far as he can throw the daedalus.
00:13 < solios> (also, he put off the conversation that would have clued him in)
00:13 < Slip> alright
Mastering notes, 2016.12.07 – Made Raven’s screens good and illegible.
