Renders on the 12th and 13th, line art on the 13th, page comp at… some point this weekend. Finally got to shading tonight – I’ve hit a “need more details” bump on my current work gig, so rather than work on other paying gigs I took the night off to finish up an in-progress thing of my own. That evens the scales – the rest of this week is science work, illustration work, and probably some video work. I technically worked on work over the weekend – a tuesday night “working weekend” is better than no weekend at all.
I skimped on the classroom, such as it is – and I skimped hard. Bedlam lockers, Bedlam teacher desk, Bedlam AV hardware, Bedlam filing cabinets. Very low detail student desks. Very WYSIWYG. As the script exists in my head this is the last time a classroom will appear in DCR, and the next two pages will be the last time the school interior shows up. No reason to spend any more time on the 3D CG than I would have spent on the 2D CG back when DCR had “strip”-styled backgrounds.
Well, building, anyway. I have enough of a toolbox to do basic stuff quickly and easily. The difference between the flat 2d backgrounds and the 3d is rendering time – once the 2d is done it’s done, for real. Rendering time on the classroom was a bit ridiculous – twelve photometric area lights with final gather and global illumination set to decent quality made for a good amount of Hurry Up And Wait. I intend for the mockup work for the next two pages to jet through faster, though that depends entirely on the level of authenticity I want to pack into the shots. And I’d like at least some.
Shading, fortunately, was kind of a “fuck you!” to the last nine pages. Three layers – shadow, gradated shadow, light. The rest of the scene was a bit of a mess, frankly – four shadow layers, one main “light,” and tons of “spot” work. Chapter one it ain’t, and Transitional Voices it ain’t – the last thirty or so pages have been quite the exercise in shadow-matching, and I’m finally starting to get a handle on it.
Script – blurred some names on the script page, streamlined Whitehouse’s doodling to an icon that fits more with the overall story, and otherwise… hey, everything’s pretty much spot on!
Also… I’m sure you’ve noticed! Jason now has a color palette!.
Technically he’s had one since The Dualist, and he’s had a complete palette since I drummed one up for a discarded DCR.1 cover. Until now his on-page appearances in DCR have been white. RGB 255 255 255, CMYK 0 0 0 0 white. This worked fine for DCR.1 and the first few pages of DCR.2, but the second “proper” shading kicked in Jason started to seem fairly out of place- especially compared to Jesse, Yang, James, etceteras. From here on he’s in (desaturated) color. Thematically, I figured the gender and aesthetic discrepancy between his present and previous lives and the first transition from “full” past life regression (as opposed to “spectator” past life regression) to the present would be a great time to implement this.
Thematically, it makes sense to me. Technically, it makes even more sense to me – having worked it in this way I save myself the Amazing Pain! of going back and shading every previous instance of Whitehouse. I had my fun with Ornix’s shirt, thank you – I’d like to think I’ve evolved past the need for massive continuity-altering editing of prior work. I’ve made it a whole year without one – thirteen months without a relapse!
FORWARD!
Oh, and on that note… this is the only “flashback” of the chapter. There’s only one left for the book, and it’s a doozy. Got a whole lot of now to get through before that, though – the rest of the chapter is relative present tense… and will be on a mini-hiatus, on hold until I get out from under at least a bit of my illustration workload. At the very least, I need to buy more art supplies – financially, that’s end of the week at the earliest, regardless of how everything else goes.
