The DCR metadata has been cleaned up and put back online. The work focused on chapter one and the first four pages of chapter two, and consisted primarily of link editing. Links to most old instances of The Dualist (back when it was ATC) have been fixed and in a few cases removed. A load of old dead links have been removed, though all of the old dead links to various PGHGoth-related nights and personalities have been retained. I also indulged in some minor editing and removed all links to images hosted on dcr.org and the old version of the ATC website.

By the time the metadata audit is complete, I should have that site isolated enough to finally delete it.

I’ve also added most of the Hemera crew to the cast section. The mass entry is missing one or two Addicaines, which I’ll generate at a later date.

All ATC data has been copied out of the CMS. TV and The Dualist are ready for auditing – TV will be next. I’ll likely do The Dualist in chunks and then apply the fix after all pages have been processed. That’s gonna be awhile – this bit of work (pulling over 500 entries and proofing just over 30 of them) has made my brain gooey, so I’m gonna do something else for a bit.

I need to edit a couple of pages of DCR.1 to bring them in line with standards established in DCR.3 – I’ll post links to the pages when I’ve finished the fixes.

Later : Make that page, singular. The cars in whitehouse -16- have been silhouetted. Whitehouse -27- gets a pass for now – the visible vehicles can pass for ’97-era and the main panel was hit with a filter. It looks nice, but my usual stencil approach won’t match without a good amount of rubber-stamping. I’ll probably fix it at some point down the road, but for today… I’ve done more than enough work. Time to shift gears!

It’s been a couple of months since I blogged – fortunately, that time was spent on work and pages, then sobering up and producing a lot more pages. Drying out has made me a bit terse, here and elsewhere. Comic metadata has backed down from epic Giant Walls Of Text to the old fashioned A Few Relevant Paragraphs, Facebook is back to being nearly useless, and clicking on the hashtags I’ve been adding to the twitter updates has been like people-watching at the mall – a massive boost to my self esteem.

Sorta.

First thing in the morning I check IRC scrollback and email instead of razing facebook entries and wiping malformed tweets. My SMS log is no longer an embarassing mess and is starting to gather dust.

This is a very good thing.

Intellectually I’m aware that I need to get out and socialize a bit more. Emotionally, sobriety has dried out the plaintive reedy whine of “But I gotta meeeeeeet people!!!!” and replaced it with a cold crisp husk of Fuck That Noise. Week Six on the wagon and I’ll be going out again – hopefully I’ll have a better time of it tonight. My last outing was a social misfire but good for the chapter four script – I’ve made a couple of revisions to it since then and need to start filling in the gaps and tightening the screws.

At this point I don’t care who’s eyefucking me or shouldering me out of the way or yelling idiocy into my ear – clubs are no fun at all sober. They still put my head in a creative place that’s hard to find elsewhere, and the script needs that more than I need to not be listening to mouthbreathers bellow about Dat Ass.

That I’m doing this on walks, in the laundromat and sober is pretty awesome, honestly. While the entirety of DCR (and The Dualist) was outlined and developed as a DWI, this is the first block of script that’s made meaningful progress under the watchful gaze of a recovering liver. For chapter four to get rolling conveniently, I’ll need to further develop the script while working on the rest of chapter three. While only twelve pages remain, I expect them to take another six to eight weeks to produce, at best – several environments need to be modeled, rendering time needs to be tanked, work will be picking up and there’s a good chance I may wind up juggling multiple clients.

In other words, I’m coming up on a gear change and after 3.25 – which I plan to produce on the 10th – DCR will be dropping out of update supercruise for awhile. As per usual I’ll be working on the comic, just not updating it. The real change here is “working on the comic” actually means “working on the comic,” not “nursing a hangover and playing EVE.”

I’d like to hit 500 pages by the end of the year. Given that ATC is currently somewhere in the 470s you’d think this would be a slam dunk – if I can keep my shit together, hopefully it will be.

The full environment for scene one of DCR.3 is done and running. 29 panels, 2-4 assembly renders and one main render for each, a predicted worst-case of three hours per main render and 3.5-4.5 total CG rendering and setup time for each panel… add in plenty of real life slosh and we’re looking at roughly a week to ten days to grind it all out. Dropping final gather and global illumination from 250 samples to 200 seems to have given this thing the kick it needs – the first panel of 3.05 is way bigger than the main render the last panel of 3.04 was built from and rendered in roughly 2/3 the time. While it’s still longer than I’d like, I’ll still be rendering a lot faster than I can draw, given that I can render while sleeping, render while editing video, render while showering…. render while I’m otherwise occupied.

Rendering is fire-and-forget. Actual page assembly – once the renders are plugged in – averages 6-8 hours, depending. My printer’s about out of ink and may make it through this scene – that’s the only potential production hiccup outside of my work schedule.

Renders are go, pages will follow – I aim to bust out at least one this weekend; we’ll see how quickly the rest follow.

Insert boilerplate "I'm not dead, I've been busy!" bit here.

The DCR script has been done for awhile – though I’ve recently revised the final scene to unfold more fluidly, and have revised the second major scene to implement some backstory continuity with Oiuja Bordello, a project I’m collaborating on with my friend Ben. I’ll be doing colors, shading, and digital bits for that comic – it’s a change in work methods, a challenge I’m rising to and a chance to work on a color comic – something I won’t be doing with ATC again until DCR is complete.

My preparation work for DCR.3 has been far more extensive than previous chapters – at this point I have a full typed script (my first), and 27 of the 36 pages have been laid out. The “prepared” portions bookend a scene I’ve been blocking on for awhile – while the dialogue is set, the demise of my digital camera last summer has left me without the readily available means to shoot the scene. I’ll have to be creative, and timely – the chapter takes place in August, so a late spring or early summer shoot would be optimal… which in turn means I can produce 12 pages of the chapter before hitting a wall.

Typically I finalize dialogue and do layouts on a scene-by-scene basis. This is the first time I’ve had more than 8-12 pages ready to start production on. I still need to do the initial 3d modeling and environment setup for the initial scene, a speed-bump that I’ve been stuck on for the past several weeks due to a combination of factors – both external and internal. Work is scratching my 3d itch – an itch that the comic used to have sole dibs on. The rest of my time has been split between working with Mike Schneider on some VFX shots, loose, messy development of ATC book one (which Ben has expressed interest in drawing, with the caveat that the story is tight enough to fit into a reasonable page count – roughly the size of a chapter of The Dualist, which is doable) and video games, which I’ve long since realized are more of an Avoidance mechanism than a means of entertainment (though Mass Effect 1 and 2 have fulfilled both roles admirably).

I’m maybe a week away from being able to start production of the first three pages, with an additional week to get set up for four through ten and another couple of days to prep resources for eleven and twelve. Environments need to be modeled (basic “sets” in the case of the first couple of pages, a more detailed workup for the rest), dummies need to be configured, props need to be created… that “week away” starts whenever I start grinding on assets. With a bit of luck and a lot of determination I could have the first page of the chapter up within the next two weeks, though at this point that’s a really loose estimate, and not a reliable one. At this point there are simply too many extra-comic variables to consider. That list could get shorter over time, though at this point it has the potential to explode into one hell of an exercise in time management.

Realistically, I’m thinking the first third of the chapter will be ground out over the spring, the second third during the summer, and the finale in the fall. While it’s a slower production pace than I’d like, that estimate considers the existing workload and resource restrictions – we’ll see what happens after I’ve transmuted the present inertia into something bigger than a blog post.