Suddenly, Exposition. Panel four could have been expanded into a book, though doing so would have blown pacing all to hell. James called in an object reader – that ought to be enough to imply he’s already tried just about everything else. More over the next couple of pages, more in Chapter Three.

Always, there is more.

Strip 203 – Panel one would be the Good Art Panel of this page – James looks great, Yang looks pretty awesome, and it scales well. Panel two is a bit goofier – some perspective versus artistic ability issues, plus – somehow! – the weird little “black block” rendering “drops” that plague the Daedalus interior. Which is where the keyboard came from, actually – the fact that it glitches and everything else has just rendered makes me wonder what exactly the issue is. Hopefully a future round of software updates will fix it before I get back to Transitional Voices and I won’t have to debug it.

Strip 204 – The Bad Art Panel of this page. Line art looked fine, shading looks fine zoomed in to full size… and it looks Completely Wrong zoomed out (and at webscale). James, you bastard!

Strip 205 – Oh look. Words. IMPORTANT words. You should read them. Since they’re, yanno. Important and stuff.

Strip 206 – The first shot that gives any real indication of the size/shape of the BMRI torus. Huzzah. Also a toe-tip into the “occult” terminology that The Dualist occasionally chokes on. I love architectural materials – this shot would have been an absolute nightmare to set up with my Dualist-era skillset. Now? One test-render back during the mapping stage. One. :D

The buffer is down to one page, with another almost completely rendered. Instead of being a Good Little Rivethead by spending the rest of the evening extending that buffer, I’m going to assemble the page after next and spend the night with Jim Beam and EVE. Or post this and then boozengame. More likely, some combination of all that, in no particular order.

An art change from the strips – a few tweaks to minimize the pectoral/ponytail convergence in panel one. Didn’t eliminate it completely, but it’s a lot more obvious in the strip.

Seven left out of a block of thirteen, with the next one rendered and lettered (but not drawn or shaded). At this point I’m roughly halfway done with this leg of the chapter, and should have the scene completed this week.