First major change: the display that forms panel three has been updated. Minor wording changes, and the previous front/back drawings of the Majestic have been replaced with screenshots of the model. They WERE gonna be renders, but the “toons” shader is such a huge pain in the ass that I wound up taking screenshots of an earlier version of the model in Silo and photoshopping from there. The advantage of going that route is that it saved a ton of time AND it’s actually the look I want. While the toons shader works well for the Daedalus status displays, I’ll probably be going with this for everything else in the future.
In the first draft of the first edition, all vehicles were hand drawn except for the Daedalus and Loki, until chapter four (five of the second edition). In the second draft, everything but the Majestic was replaced, as the Sabrosa and Cheops had been modeled by that point. I figured I’d need the Majestic for Transitional Voices (and was already hankering to rework The Dualist), so it became one of my earliest “practice” models in Silo. When the time came to start work on the Second Edition, the model was ready to go… and finally, every vehicle* is CG.
Second major change: panel two (counting the radar scope as panel one) has been extensively modified. The background has been matched with the rest of the scene (it’s upside down, though!) and the biomagnetic beastie has been souped up. Lots of souping, actually – I added texture,then separated the head from the body and blurred the body out… then a basic mass of sarlacc-esque energy tentacles. Flatten a copy to use as a target background for the Majestic sensor package, then back into photoshop to add The Gripping Energy Tentacle Things. Pixellated a bit, then a night of failing to come up with an adequate HUD overlay… then a night of coming up with a good HUD overlay – both built from the display panels developed for the bridge of the Daedalus (Transitional Voices). Then lots and lots and lots of mucking around with silhouettes of Torg, Grij, and the Captain. Mucking and mucking until they fell into place… then more HUD tweaks to make everything fit. A lot more work than it should have been, but it’s a one-off and I don’t think I’ll ever need to reproduce it.**
A lot of that mucking has been due to a serious battle with exhaustion over the past week. My day job schedule has me working 5 on, 2 off, 3 on, 1 off, SEVEN on, 3 off, repeat. Those sevens are murder, especially when I’m trying to keep things moving on both ATC and work fronts. It doesn’t allow for much in the way of quality sleep, and rapidly becomes a state of perpetual blah. Blah means hours of staring at the monitor instead of doing stuff with Photoshop. Blah is bad. Combatting blah is tough – it means fighting my natural instinct to stuff myself full of all the legal uppers on the planet, it means getting to bed early, and it involves one factor I have no control over – it depends on my upstairs neighbor getting home either well before I go to bed, or well after I go to sleep. It depends heavily on his love affair with his stereo being at low ebb.
In many respects, neighborguy is everything that made my six month stint on Edwards Way a living hell, only with the volume turned down and occasional breaks. While this apartment is a step up from previous conditions, it’s probably not a place I’ll be able to stay in the long term, unless this guy moves out and a quieter person – a quieter person with much quieter pets – moves in.
I can hope – but at this point, it’s a ways down the list of things I’m hoping for… and it falls in the “act of gid” category, as opposed to the “hard work and a bit of luck” category. All the stuff I’m really hoping (and working) for lives there.
* Except for Ornix’s car, which is a mix of hand drawn, photo-manipulated, and two different CG models. By the same token, the Majestic sensor pod on the Majestic model and the sensor pod that appears in five shots of what’ll be Chapter Six are gloriously inconsistent. The earlier version (coming up in a couple of chapters) is actually more detailed than the version on the vehicle model, so I’ll stick with it and hope some future Editor doesn’t notice. >_>;;
** At this point there aren’t any TIC scenes in TV, and most of the future Heirotus interior shots will be flight deck, corridors, sick bay, and other environments I still need to build. At this time the TIC isn’t one of them… but it’s a dark room with a BIG screen, so if I ever need a cg version, it shouldn’t take long to create.
Mastering notes, 2016.12.06 – Minor visual adjustments.
