Curtis! Closure! Door slams! Crushing disappointment! A UFO over North Side! Shaded while re-watching The Prisoner! Hinge point of a high stress near-breakdown that had better damned well follow up on the line of thought unleashed around 4am Thursday! Exclamation points!!!

Also, next to last page of DCR. 5.20 is ready for line art and I may well start pencilling after I post this – if I don’t, it’ll be high priority for the second half of Friday.

Gotta wonder what regional radar operators would think of an object the size of a C-130 with the handling characteristics of a helicopter briefly popping up on the sweep.

Fun fact: the lights on the office building very very loosely conform to the positions of Thad and Jason (or rather, Dyluck and Aleph) as represented on the face of MBO-2 (Lang is at the top, Dyluck is second, Jason is further down).

Fun fact number two: With one style exception, Curtis’s eyes have always been visible through his glasses. Jason’s are generally opaque (with one style exception that I can recall offhand) for plot reasons with style a secondary concern; Curtis’s glasses are an artifact of DCR.1’s “who gives a shit?!” production values and in this case are transparent to service style and plot.

2012 08 07, 00:24 – Go for renders. A thematic callback to the middle of DCR.2 – then, Jesse was reacting to the presence of Jason. Now, Thad reacts to his absence.

As mentioned previously – the first seven panels of this page can be rendered without additional CG assets or lighting adjustments. I may well draw this page first, just to get it out of the way – it depends on how my schedule shakes out this week.

03:50 – Finally, the modeling work done on the kitchen pays off. I built the geometry almost two years ago in support of DCR.2 and managed to not use it. Until now!

13:06 – Hung it up last night with the final pass of panel four rendering. Panel five is GO and I expect six and seven to render this afternoon, giving me tonight to work on eight. I’ve retooled the sound effect in panel five to be a full-panel SLAM! instead of the relatively quiet (eg not full-panel) KLA-CHUNK. The thumbnailed panel five was essentially a repeat of panel one – I opted for something more dynamic, and finally made use of the fact that the door knocker has a rotation point. I think it’s worth noting that no additional assets were created for this page – little details like the door knocker, kitchen, and empty radio station (with desk chair) have existed for years. I’ve merely revised the layouts a bit to squeeze some functionality out of them at the end of their run.

2012 08 08, 14:08 – I just slotted the last interior shot – a re-render of panel six. The camera was rolled in the opposite direction. The original angle, while different from the angle of panel five, wasn’t different enough. That’s the last render of the corridor environment, hopefully for good!

While panel eight still needs to be rendered, all panels requiring line art are complete. Counting the last panel of the previous page, fully one third of the remaining panels are either functionally complete or ready for line art.

2012 08 09, 13:03 – Rendering completed early this morning – unless I smack the office building texture on a cube to get it with Proper Perspective. All other instances are slightly off so I don’t see why this one shouldn’t be. Panel eight was originally planned to be sourced from the last panel of the last page of DCR.2. Then I remembered Jason’s megaphone, and figured he might have forgotten it. End result? Lots of fiddling around and a thematically strong composition. The initial drafts of the last two panels are both Kubrick shots – what I wound up with does a lot more to convey meaning than a pair of equally weighted one-point shots would have. Thad’s line of action – leaving 608 behind, descending (into depression, substance abuse, and general nuttiness), and Jason’s line of action – leaving the megaphone behind, ascending (to Australia, then SPAAAAAAAACE!)- will eventually intersect, which is why I’m happy with the panel order and Thad’s visual proximity to the Loki. I thought about flipping the shot order to create some distance – that makes no sense given the visual tone of the next page, and even less sense in that re-ordering the panels would bork the converging lines, sending the characters off in different directions.

Think of it as some seriously subtle foreshadowing.

Oh, and the megaphone? Modeled in January of 2010 as a “return to flight” exercise. Used as a reference prop in DCR.2. This isn’t its only CG appearance – you can see it lurking around as a prop in 2.7 and 2.16. This is the first time it’s been the focal point of a shot.

2012 08 16, 04:02 – Ready for shading. And shadow-matched, more or less – I took some liberties, and the results are encouraging. Hope to get to shading tonight or tomorrow.

23:03 – Shaded panels 1, 2, 4 and 7 this morning after blasting through 5.18. Then a three hour meeting followed by a roughly five hour nap and three hour wakeup procedure. Then shading, panels 3 and 6. Now 5.18 and 5.19 are in spit-shining and cleanup while I figure out if 5.20 pencils and inks are going to happen in the Friday AM or PM.