Progress Report - February 22, 2021 - So Much DVa! (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

So firstly, just as a quick aside, I am moving Progress Report day to be Friday evenings, rather than Thursday evenings. I have taken to using Thursdays as mental rest days, which means that I get no work done on Wednesdays (stream) or Thursdays (rest day), and I like to get a little bit of work done before I post Progress Reports. With that said:

Oh my!

This DVa comic has been taking more time than I anticipated, but when I reflect on my time projections and how they were calculated, it's not terribly far off. The Jill/Rebecca comic was 56 panels, it only had 2 unique sex poses (3 if you count Jill's behind-glass bukkake at the beginning), and it had a fairly straightforward construction to it.

But Data Collection here... Well, to say it's gone off the rails and above and beyond my intentions would be an understatement. It's currently sitting at 117 panels, with two more chapters in its narrative to go. I've considered, a few times now, corralling it in and wrapping it up - but then I convince myself that the whole point of comics is to explore ideas without limitation or restriction. So what if a comic ends up taking 2 weeks instead of 1 week? That's still literal months less time than to produce a video with a fraction of the progress scope.

So, I'm letting go of the leash and just letting this comic run wild. And boy, has it been a ride! The post image today is a collection of panels scattered throughout the comic. And I think you all can agree, this goes places.

What's not shown here is the sheer amount of motion panels. I've teased my experiments with the technique on Twitter over the past week. Some of these motion panels take as many as six shots - three for the motion itself, and then another 3 for the x-ray counterparts. Yes, that's right, this comic has x-rays, too!

I am hoping to finish the principle posing early this upcoming week. Principle posing is placeholder posing to the level of quality seen here, and notably without any lighting. Once that's done, I will render all of the panels out, quickly edit all of the motion panels together as necessary, and begin working on improving my Comic Layout Generator tool.

As you may or may not know, I wrote a custom program for automatically generating layouts, for the Jill/Rebecca comic. It's not feature-complete, has some bugs, and has major performance issues - it'd take 7 seconds to make any changes to the layouts on the Jill/Rebecca comic, and that's with only 56 panels to process. This DVa comic here? I'm expecting it to land in the 150 to 175 panels range.

I also want to improve the feature-set of the tool, to allow for some more creative layout opportunities. Just play with the format a bit.

All in all, I am hoping to have the raw layouts generated by this time next week. Then I need a week to finish the posing, finalizing the lighting, and render out the final panels. With any luck, editing will begin during that week, and the week after that, the comic should be done!

So 3-4 weeks to produce the comic, rather than the "1 week for a Jill/Rebecca-length comic" that I projected earlier. But I think we can all agree this isn't a Jill/Rebecca length comic, nor is it anywhere as straightforward in its production. And, hopefully, you all will enjoy the comic when it's said and done!

I for one have been really enjoying working on this comic. It's been great to just let me ideas run wild, rather than the strict regiment I have to stick to when producing videos. This has been doing wonders for my mental health, and I think I will be more than ready to get back to working on the Rachel project once this comic is out the door.

As two final notes:

1.) The final comic will use proper comic-bubble construction. The subtitle-esque text is merely how Source Filmmaker's internal text tool behaves, which I use for keeping track of pacing and narrative when building these comics.

2.) Similarly, the non-English shown in this preview is not final. Once the layout generation is done and the principle panels are all ready for the polish pass, I intend to get the language use thoroughly double-checked. The last thing I want to do is make a dunce of myself by using the wrong Mexican-Spanish or Korean words.

That's all for now! Take care, everyone!