Mom was gonna come down and visit today. Then the weather weighed in. The entire state is getting dumped on – the phones are dead, there’s no immediate work on deck. I’m broke and even if I wasn’t, for christmas I promised myself The Wagon for at least a few weeks. This status report is being written at the outset of what will hopefully be the first ALL ATC ALL DAY work session in… uh. Years!

TV.2 (Return To Color) Production Status

All 24 pages have been laid out. Extensive in-page script revisions have been made to several pages; all pages outside of the first rendering block still need to be “framed” and lettered.

Pages 07 through 15 have been rendered. 10 through 15 are pretty much ready for line art, 07 through 09 will need some extensive post-rendering digital work in addition to line art. Renders finished earlier this week, consuming 100% CPU for roughly two weeks. Rendering ops resulted in 342 files totaling 4.07 gigs uncompressed in the PC “00 TV2 Renders” directory. The mac-side data is compressed – LZW for the tiffs and .zip for the 3d files – and weighs in at 2.28g compressed counting the page files.

All work that can be done with entirely existing assets has been done. Pages 2.01 through 2.06 and 2.16 through 2.24 require assets that are either in development or ready for it. Work has started on the environment for 2.16-2.17 though no appreciable progress has been made within the past week or so due to work and render ops. Further development has been pushed back in order to focus on assets required for 2.01 through 2.06. I sunk a good amount of time into modeling work yesterday and plan to get a hell of a lot more done today. I don’t know when (or even if) I’ll have this much time to throw at CG work so I plan to make the most of it.

Properly nerdy details would be pretty spoileriffic at this point. Sufficed to say I’m grinding away on a major asset. CG requirements for TV.2 scene one are such that the best-case estimate for asset development is “January.” If you were reading ATC back in ’07-’08 you know that a CG asset typically takes me 2-6 weeks to develop with a metronomic day job financing production. Three years freelance has complicated my schedule considerably, and it’s worth noting that the asset in question already has a couple of weeks of here-and-there effort invested in it, most of that in 2008 and 2009.

While my phone or inbox could still produce a work-related distraction, hopefully today I will find out just how much I can accomplish with a focused blast of effort.

While doing laundry earlier this week I did some thought exercises to see what ATC production would look like on a regular schedule. If I rolled this thing out weekly instead of as fast as possible, I’d have a total of seventeen weeks from GO! to develop the assets required for the back end of the chapter, and an additional seven weeks to finalize the TV.3 script and start work on layouts and assets. While production almost certainly won’t go down this way, it remains a possibility… and it wouldn’t surprise me if 24 pages wound up taking six months to produce from GO!. Heck, this thing’s already been in some stage of development since September. Of 2008.

Back to the fish mines!

Today’s the first day I’ve had a good-sized chunk of “me” time in a couple of weeks. Well, “me” time that isn’t 4am exhausted wind-down Fallout: New Vegas time. Lots of client work, now down to waiting on payments, contracts, and communications. Wednesday seems a natural lull for this sort of thing – over the course of 2012 rather a lot of comic work got done on Wednesdays.

In previous TV blog posts I wrote about the notion of rendering ahead as a means of rectifying a complex schedule with comics production and CG requirements and so forth. I’ve been working ahead for quite awhile – many pages of DCR.5 were rendered for weeks before I caught up on line art, but that was a linear progression. This is the first time I’ve jumped ahead to render ahead. As of yesterday afternoon, six pages of TV.2 have been rendered and are ready for line art. That’s a quarter of the chapter – and it happens to be (roughly) the second quarter. The environment was built in 2008, the script was solid (since revised to be solider), layouts were done, reference dummies popped into existence easily enough, and the whole mess – 38 panels sum total – took roughly nine days to render. The Daedalus rec area and bridge are absolute pigs – big files, lots of geometry, a crapload of high resolution texture maps, lots of lights set up back when I was still figuring out photometrics and mental ray and all that. Future environments will render faster.

So, six pages are rendered and ready for line art preparation and script tweaks and so forth. I may re-render a panel or two, though I probably won’t – a few shots look a bit rough with the reference objects in place, but that’s almost entirely due to shaders and specularity and I can totally ignore or improve on that when things get to line art. The rough spots I’m thinking of are towards the middle of the scene, so when the pages finally do get into production I should have the time to re-render a panel or two if it turns out things are sub-optimal.

There are two or three (possibly two and a half) more pages I can render with existing assets, and two environments to re-light. These bits will likely be done before any substantial progress is made on assets for the first six pages of the chapter. I’ve done a bit of modeling work for one of the last two scenes – a solid foundation, but the assets need a lot more work before they’ll be ready for primetime. Hopefully I’ll have more time for 3d work over the next couple of weeks.

Oh, and I managed to lay out two whole pages of the last scene while doing laundry last week.

Quite a bit of work has been done over the past couple of weeks, though you won’t see any of it for a couple of months. When pages do start showing up, they’re set to hit at a steady, predictable, no-cg-holdups-just-drawing pace.

All told. Now to get the rest of today’s to-do list taken care of!

13:02 < solios> I sketched out templar provisional hq while taking a shit
13:03 < solios> seemed an optimal use of time and resources (and poop)
13:03 < solios> (I sketched it with a pen.)
13:08 < xeno__m> poopsketcher
13:12 < solios> >.>
14:18 < mdxi> Your search – poopsketcher – did not match any documents
14:18 < mdxi> haven’t seen that happen in a while
14:18 < solios> O_o
14:18 < mdxi> “Did you mean: poop catcher”
14:18 < mdxi> NO MOST CERTAINLY NOT

I’m fine with talking obliquely about spoilers with regards to TV.2 – it’s a transitional chapter, full of a lot of fairly important details but relatively light on surprises. The real fun happens in TV.3 and TV.4 and I intend to remain tight-lipped about the back half of the book.

Last night I created layouts and script revisions for the core of TV.2. A little bit ago I scanned in those parts of the workbook and after I finish this I’ll get a few pages scripted and guttered. I intend to start production renders for pages ten through fifteen on Friday or Saturday. If the calculations based on initial test renders are accurate those six pages will take the rest of the month to render. Most of the pages are five or six panels, one is currently fourteen – less if I can figure out a way to cut it down while conveying the same information. A production-grade test render of an area roughly 1/3 of a page in size took six hours earlier this week – while not all panels are going to take that long to render, my (very) rough estimate is two big panels a day, tops. During which I’ll need non-PC things to do. Right now that’s a good-sized list, very little of it ATC-related.

Pages six through seventeen now have layouts or revised layouts and script or revised script. Pages seven through fifteen have environments and I plan to start rendering with page ten within the next couple of days. The first Daedalus scene is just about ready to render – after yesterday’s crash course in Character Studio I flirted with the idea of upgrading the reference dummies before starting production but after some thought I ultimately decided against it – with a little bit of effort I can slam these pages into production now, and that’s kind of the point. I’d sooner save biped revisions for later; possibly the second Daedalus scene or in TV.3. Hell, I’m moving forward with the first Daedalus scene precisely because the requirements are relatively minimal. Upgrading the biped now would be counter-productive – while my test rig showed obvious benefits to upgrading, the idea behind rolling ahead on renders now is minimal setup work, grinding through a CPU-hogging scene while I’m focused on other things. Which I need to be focused on, which biped upgrades would take focus from.

So. The first major chunk of the chapter will be produced with existing methods, despite their inefficiencies – CG production time needs to be focused on asset creation for the time being. Objects that’ll be CG in finished pages regardless – vehicles and environments.

13 pages featuring the Daedalus (inside and out), three pages using other existing environments. Eight pages from scratch or with minimal existing assets, six of those at the front of the chapter. “Go!” layouts and script for 12 pages, “Start!” script and layouts for five pages, “Start!” script and no layouts yet for the seven pages at the end.

Still on track for pages in January; apparently still on track for the pages to flow regularly once the first five are in order. TV.2 is shaping up to be an exercise in long-term planning. It’s been on the shelf for almost five years – how couldn’t it be?

TV.1 page files are 2250×3375 at 365 dpi and cleanly reduce to 600×900. The pages of The Dualist and TV.1 were prepped without hardcopy gutters and still need to be expanded and forked to CMYK for hardcopy. Panel max width is 2190.

Page files from DCR.2 onward are 3300×5040 at 480 dpi with a “live” area of 2880×4320 and a web select area of 2944×4417 that reduces to 600×900. Panel max width is 2848. Grayscale pages are immediately ready for hardcopy. Finished pages are reduced to webscale and web gutters with a photoshop action. I’m not going back to TV.1 templates for TV.2 – I’m converting DCR.2-5 templates to RGB with black gutters and moving on at the current production resolution.

DCR.2-5 dialogue was 5.16pt with a leading of 6.09pt. TV.2 dialogue is provisionally set for 5.25pt with a leading of 6.5. TV.1 was 5pt with a leading of 6.58pt; this upsamples to 7.52pt with a leading of 8.61pt when scaled to the same size as the working TV.2 template file. So dialogue is technically going down in size between TV.1 and TV.2, unchanged from DCR.5. Dialogue has used rectangles with a 10px radius and minimum four pixel thickness since forever – I don’t plan on changing that with this revision of the template.

Existing draft of script (completed a couple of months ago) transcribed to RTF with a few changes. Page count is 24. Some dense for dialogue, some sparse. Pages will doubtless be expanded between draft and web publication. Ten pages have provisional layouts – some solid, some sketchy – scanned this afternoon in parallel with transcription. Workbook assembled in InDesign; hardcopy completed at 23:25. Fourteen pages need layouts, a few of the existing layouts may be refined.

24 page directories were created in the TV 02 Chapter Two – Water directory on 26 November, populated with {$pagenumber}l and {$pagenumber}z sub-directories. Adjusted template detailed above and blank commentary files were populated to those directories this afternoon. Pages will be provisionally blocked off for layouts when the full script is thumbnailed. Page seventeen is technically already laid out; just needs captions.

Environment assets required for pages 7-15 already exist. 1-6 and cover need assets, 16-17 need assets, environmental assets are required for 18-24, though the majority of the real estate already exists. 16-17 should be fairly straightforward; the rest are more complicated. Depending on workload, schedule and layout development there’s a possibility that rendering work may begin on 7-15 (or at least 10-15) before assets for 1-6 are complete, as asset development requires hours of sustained attention per day over a period of several days or weeks and rendering work requires a few minutes of setup and checking work per panel then it’s Hurry Up And Wait. If I had layouts and updated reference dummies I could actually start firing those off right now. In fact I should probably proceed in this direction, as the Daedalus interiors are absolute pigs and took forever to render at 365.

That doesn’t mean I’ll start rendering today, of course. Part of the move forward with TV.2 is higher-detailed positional assets (3d bipeds), adding boots and collars and the like to get a better idea of perspective and more importantly to throw accurate bounce lighting so the 2d assets fit cleanly into the scene. This came off fairly well in TV.1. The technique was improved considerably over the course of DCR though with grayscale I didn’t have to match color. I intend to improve on that in TV.2. Boots and collars and boobs – bolt-on cantaloups will be a thing of the past. West’s hard-topped cap will be a proper soft-cover if it kills me. I can prep the dummies without layouts but I can’t put them to proper use until they exist, so layouts and dummy prep need to be high priorities over the next week or two.

As an almost entirely dedicated work session today has gone exceptionally well. I’d keep plodding along, but my stated mission – script and page template preparation – is complete and I need to do some finishing work on a client project tonight if I’m to have a hope in heck of paying rent this week. I’m not sure how my schedule for December is going to shake out but at the moment it looks like weekdays split between different types of client work with weekends hopefully dedicated to ATC. In this context, prioritizing layouts and positional assets makes a lot of sense, as with a bit of up-front work I’ll have something to roll with before the end of the month. The next page is not the production goal – Transitional Voices Chapter Two in its entirety is the production goal. So “skipping ahead” isn’t really skipping ahead – it’s potentially making the best practical use of available time.

I do that a lot with ATC. Write when I’m creative, work when I’m not. The TV.2 draft was generated this summer, then put on hold for Observer Effect. Today it’s been transcribed and prepared for full layouts and digital work, and the page directory structure and templates have been created. A lot of boring work, a lot of necessary work, and I’ve grown to greatly prefer doing it all at once instead of on an as-need basis. Less so with line art, as it requires more attention and more than a page or two of pencilling and inking causes a great deal of physical strain.

Copious amounts of thinking out loud, which ultimately adds up to this: when production finally starts, Daedalus interior scenes should hopefully roll out faster than the rest of the chapter. As Daedalus scenes account for 58% of the chapter, this bodes well for actual production pace of TV.2.

The TV.2 script hit a solid first-revision draft back in August. Then Observer Effect happened. Ten pages in roughly ten weeks isn’t bad, considering everything else that’s been going on in my life. The story is stronger for it, though TV.2 development was put on hold while that sequence came into being.

For the time being ATC is done with grayscale. The story is now moving chronologically forward for the first time since July of 2008. The next page will be the TV.2 cover, which requires the same assets and environment as the first six pages of the installment. Asset and script development will resume this week – the script after a brief hiatus, assets after an extensive period of time off. The key asset of TV.2 scene one is roughly 80% complete for geometry and has been since late 2009.

At present the plan is to get the TV.2 script finished and laid out before the end of the year, and to get the initial assets ready to go within the same period. All of this is subject to work and scheduling issues, though the script and assets are far enough along that this may be achievable even if things get totally bent out of shape.

Development may be punctuated by blog posts the way DCR.5 was.

I have some work-work to deal with first and I’m still recovering from The Flu From Hell, so I don’t expect to make any real progress this week. I do plan to update the blog on a fairly regular basis, though – TV.2 (hopefully) won’t suddenly appear out of nowhere.

I’ve been noodling around with iterations of outlines for a few months now. Given the results of last night’s pre-Curiosity development session I think I can comfortably state that after four years on the shelf, Transitional Voices is back in development. The basic outline for the story hasn’t changed, and that’s made burning it down to the skeleton and rebuilding it from scratch less of a challenge.

While development is still hit and miss, most of what I generated last night I consider Good, and at least one bit is In The Script for sure. I plan to continue evolving the DCR development model – script, layouts, assets, production and thorough documentation. I also plan to finish DCR, make the DCR and Dualist continuity passes, and overhaul the site before production on TV resumes in earnest. Script development is GO and will continue to be GO until I’ve got something to work with. After four years off it’s less a question of where things are going (that hasn’t changed) and more a question of how to get there efficiently, while doing things that haven’t been done with the other two books.

I could probably crunch out a viable script for TV.2 in a week – it has been percolating for awhile. I don’t actually need that script for at least a couple of months, so for the time being wrapping up DCR is the priority.

Message ends!