DCR Backgrounds

Since the summer of 2005 the vast majority of ATC environments either have 3d components or are entirely 3d. The move to 3d turned out to be a huge time sink, and not necessarily in the modeling and rendering departments. I used to bitch about both quite a bit; these days I’m comfortable with the process and know how to work with it. Rendering does take awhile but new environments take considerably less time to set up than old environments did, and Mental Ray has turned out to be an enormous time-saver as well as a Make Art Button. I knew none of this in 2005 – when I decided ATC needed to go 3d I was basing that on the fact that I was spending 90% of page creation time on one-off non-reusable backgrounds. I knew moving to 3d environments was the right way to go, though at the time I had no idea what that meant when it came to the learning curve. Blowing the dust off of 3d knowledge that at the time hadn’t been used in six years wasn’t exactly like falling off a bike – it was a reminder that I’d never actually figured out how to ride the bike in the first place.

Yeah, I majored in Computer Animation / Multimedia in art school. I liked the multimedia bits and got a job doing that. In 2005, I had a very basic familiarity with 3d software and I was staring at one of ATC’s many vertical cliffs of skill and asset development. The struggle to get Motion into production was epic, and ended with the uninformed decision to use 3d Studio’s then-default Scanline renderer. The resulting render times were so staggeringly massive that I found myself with an enormous amount of free time between comic pages – with an idle Mac and a grunting, straining PC.

So i started Dead City Radio as a 2d comic with intentionally low production values, in order to do something while The Dualist slogged along in software. If you’ve read DCR you know that the bare-bones thing didn’t last – relative to page count, ATC production values asserted themselves fairly quickly. Whitehouse is unique in that the vast majority of that installment features 2d backdrops, “hand painted” in Photoshop. This page features a number of those backgrounds, created during periods of color comic “rendering hell.”

  • 608 balcony, daytime

    The first major environment for DCR, eventually replaced by a 3d environment.

  • 608 balcony, night

    Only a small piece of this environment made it into the comic, as part of the lead-up to Ceremony.

  • 608 bedroom, front

    The copyright-free version, briefly seen in the comic.

  • 608 bedroom, side

    Featuring an accurate calendar from 1997 and the original logo development sheet for the DCR ding.

  • 608 kitchen

    When I build the CG model of the rest of the apartment, I also modeled the kitchen. The 2d kitchen has a lot more screen time, though like most of the other 2d environments it is never seen in its entirety.

  • Corleones, side

    I’d say a lot of work went into making this bit of side-scrolling scenery look filthy, but that would be a lie – I have a lot of experience grunging stuff up. Making clean look used is a lot harder than making filthy look filthy.

  • Laga, street-side

    Lounge area, entryway, bathrooms… the television is in the wrong place, the arcade machine is missing, the scale is totally off and it still comes across as the right atmosphere. Of which a fraction was used!

  • Laga bar and dance floor

    A large environment that covers the full width of the club, circa the late 90s and missing the sound board.

  • Laga bar (back)

    DJ booth in the back, on the left. If memory serves this entered the comic templates as a sandwich, with the wire mesh over the line art.

  • Laga dance floor, front

    This backdrop got a lot more mileage than the others – it features on three out of four pages of the Ceremony scene!

  • Allegheny Center, lobby

    The last purely 2d environment of DCR, and the only one to be composited with 3d elements. While Observer Effect uses some 2d painting over 3d renders, this shot with open doors and a 3d elevator was used to transition DCR from 2d-and-photos to 3d-and-photos.