earth -5-
posted 2007.11.09 at 15:48
20080709 : I'm not all that happy with the new linework for panel one, but it's better than the previous version. As is the explosion. Admittedly, I spent more time on that than I did with my pencil and microns. I think it looks quite a bit spiffier than the old version.
It's all anime 'n shit.
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Explosions are hard.
That said, I'm currently recovering from Front Mission induced RSI, and the entire chapter is finally layed out, weighing in at 40 pages - about 12 more pages than I would've liked, but them's the breaks. This is Earth - and earth is all about inertia.
Now I get to beat on an Epson 1400 until it prints ATC pages at the same quality as an Epson 1280. I get to organize all of the 3d bits that are to be mothballed and then I get to mothball them. I get to do backups. I get to clean up the data structure for all of ATC and hopefully hammer it into something that's even easier to work with. I get to burn 13 vacation days I have no real use for. I get to upgrade my workstation to Leopard and start dealing with life under either Photoshop CS or Photoshop CS2. I get to write comixpress a hopefully nice letter asking why it's been over three months since I submitted ATC for hardcopy and I haven't heard anything.
Ultimately, I get to spend the next week cleaning up the mess of the last five years and the six weeks after that figuring out how to move forward. I can do the next seven pages with one environment, the three after that with two more - and two of those three are one-offs that'll probably only appear in this chapter. There's a chance that after all of the modelling is done, I may actually begin to enjoy this again.
Fortunately, I have a stash of anti-depressants that should help enormously in that respect.
Also. Here's what the page looks like* after a run through Vectormagic, with Illustrator CS2's "Livetrace" (color, default settings, maximum depth of 256 colors), and Freehand MX's trace (color, default settings, maximum depth of 256 colors - a more brutally counterintuitive application does not exist) for comparison:
All applications used the existing 600x900 web jpeg as the input.
Fun fact : The Stanford thingy is free (and available for now, anyway), and the Adobe apps cost hundreds of dollars. Admittedly, the Adobe apps do other things, but the fact that their vectorize ability is so clearly halfassed is... I suppose "impressive" would be the word I'm looking for.
Ph34r.
* Disclaimer : none of these apps are designed to process an image like this, so it's far from a fair or accurate test of their strengths.