2012 03 10, 22:15 – Double update. Provision -17- got about 40 seconds on the front page.
2012 03 04, 14:57 – Line art pencilled inked and cleaned up Saturday afternoon and evening. At that point it was either shade 4.17 or get additional physical work done on 4.18 and 4.19 – I opted for the latter. I’m not happy with what I’ve generated for 4.19 and will probably re-draw when I have time to pencil and ink the final asset (prop as opposed to character). In terms of environment the next page doesn’t have much to do with this page or the one before it, so I’ll probably get these shaded and posted before continuing with the creation and caching of assets.
As with the leap year update, I have no idea when I’ll have time to get to the shading. Tentatively “some time this week.” This particular page shouldn’t take much – the first panel syncs with the last few pages and the rest is (rather obviously) a different animal.
2012 03 04, 02:10 – Preliminary shading complete. May make a few more tweaks after I shade 4.17. Did this one before that one due to time constraints – after a couple of hours pencilling commissions I figured I had enough time to either shade most of 4.17 or all of 4.18. All trumped Some.
2012 03 10, 19:47 – Minor tweaks. Not terribly thrilled with the second panel. Back and forth between putting in more finishing work to bring it up to spec or sticking a fork in it and moving on to the next page.
Last shot of the space station, last shot of Tartarus for awhile. I may pull a Daedalus bridge* with that in the future – for this scene the platform turned out to be in a total of two panels, so the CG was created with relatively minimal effort. It looks minimal, but given the time and panel constraints I find the results to be perfectly acceptable. The Tartarus asset was created on January 26th and was finalized on February 3rd – it’s been roughly five weeks since then and I haven’t thought about it since. This scene could have been a debilitating timesink in the CG department – fortunately I’ve learned where and how to cut corners over the course of production, and in this case was able to generate assets that were Good Enough for the space allotted. I knew there’d be a long lead between renders and line art. I wasn’t expecting that lead to be this long. Given how the past month has gone and how the rest of this month is shaping up, I’m glad I took the time when it was available. I’m almost out of “buffered” pages, and March shows no signs of slowing down – while I may have time to draw and shade the next three pages over the next couple of weeks, I’m definitely not going to have the time to model the assets I’ll need to round out the chapter. My initial projections for chapter completion were based on a situation that evaporated in early February – I saw a Work Crunch coming and was able to bag a bunch of stuff before then. While the advance preparation has paid off handsomely, I definitely under-estimated the intensity and duration of said crunch. Point of fact I need to get back to the grind as soon as I post this.
All things considered, grousing about being overworked and nearly unpaid (or rather, low-paid and properly remunerated at some hazy point in the future) is an improvement over the boilerplate blood sugar bitching I did throughout The Dualist. If I can get through the month (and keep the lights on) my resume’s gonna be awesome.
As I mentioned previously, BTS activation is an energetic event. The initial release is depicted, but not the after effects – whatever’s left of that section of the docking ring is going to need extensive repairs. In the roughest possible terms the scale of the incident and damage to the station could be equated to the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. At this point in the timeline (1968) the BTS is still a newly {re}developed technology, so safety procedures range from relatively lax to practically nonexistent. I’m sure the Soviets had the occasional hiccup with their reverse-engineering of the B-29. Maybe they didn’t. They had operational samples to work from – Heirotus has a pile of notebooks that came out of Lang’s head.
* An inconsistency between The Dualist and Transitional Voices – the ship interior goes from hand-crafted photoshop to scale-accurate CG between books.
Also, all of this talk about BTS over the past couple of pages? Looks like a great excuse to redo Earth -33-, or at least tweak it for accuracy.
