Twelve – count’em – twelve panels. Much nicer than the original layout, in which panel 9 was a horrible Sammy Hagar joke leadin, 10 was an eyeroll, and 11 was punchline.
So, yay for linework and shading in one night – that’s the first that’s’ happened in awhile. The only real bottleneck was reworking the safety belts into the spools or mounts or whatever they’re called – a “fun” little photoshop chore I get to do for the next ten pages. Fortunately there’s a lot of exterior shots as well, so the workload evens out. And the shadow-matching “shortcut” I talked about previously is working out great – while it eats a lot of rendering time, it saves an enormous amount of time in photoshop. And that’s partly why the page is up now as opposed to, say… tomorrow.
I tried doing the exterior shots in Mental Ray – oddly enough, they rendered faster – but they also rendered crappier. Much crappier. So exterior shots will stay scanline for the foreseeable future.
Mastering notes, 2016.12.07 – Rewrote the first part of panel six.