Wonky sleep schedule and a busy week. Extensive remodeling and tweaking of the spacesuit placement model (overhauled the helmet and added a neck ring, small changes that really add up) and generating the neck ate up all of my free time – I didn’t get to line art until yesterday and shading until this morning. Simple as it is, the neck section is a Render Pig, so I don’t expect the next page for a couple of days, and still have some geometry work to do in order to get 3.34-3.36 ready for rendering.
By volume, the neck compartment is friggin’ huge – I’d say roughly 70-80 meters long with a Max Headroom of three meters. There’s a hell of a lot of empty space, cunningly hidden by character, camera, and dialogue positioning – you’ll get a better look at it on the next page, I promise. By volume it’s probably the biggest single area on the ship – I could have easily sunk more time into it, adding storage and freight tchotchkes, a couple of zip lines, etceteras. I opted for getting it done quickly and figured magnetic deck plates were good enough. The suits and standard uniform boots have magnetic soles – hence the helmet floating around, hence the captain’s hair going medusa, hence Greg occupying what would be a very perilous position in standard gravity.
As I’ve stated elsewhere with regards to other CG environments, the overall level of detail and production quality is a balance of (A) how much time I have against (B) how many pages the environment will appear, (C) rather it’s likely to be reused in the future, and (D) what the scene demands. In this case that equation broke down to (A) Not a whole lot, (B) two pages and change, (C) no and if I do reuse it I can spruce it up then, and (D) some hatches and a hallway.
That doesn’t change the fact that it turned out to be a render pig. Area lights with final gather and global illumination look great, but really suck up CPU when used in volume. Panel five was the big one – roughly five and a half hours for the final render, which turned out to be a great time to do laundry and catch up on email. After I post this I’ll get the first shot of the next page set up and grab groceries while it grinds.
Booleans, off the starboard bow!
Oh yeah – script note, for those of you following that side of things: Minor layout tweaks to match the physical reality of the Hemera hatch layout, and Greg’s main lines were revised a few times. Once earlier this year, and again during art generation. He’s still saying pretty much the same thing, he’s just saying it a hair differently than he would have otherwise.
