Progress Report - February 26, 2021 (Patreon)

Hey all. Pretend I posted this last night, which is when I intended to.

Before I get into the meat of the post, I want to address the cover. You'll notice that it's different than the last one, and that's because the comic ended up taking a different direction than I had anticipated. The original cover ended up being misleading, as Sombra doesn't actually get involved in this comic (not to say she doesn't get involved in... well, you'll have to wait to read the comic to see 👀). This new cover isn't finished, but I had to scramble to make it before the stream, which starts in 30 minutes at time of writing.

With that being said: It took longer than I anticipated, but I finally finished all of the principle posing for the DVa comic, Data Collection!

It's clocked in at 171 panels in total, spread across 6 different project files due to memory-use concerns (each shot is an effective copy of all animations. A single shot isn't much memory, but 50 of them add up quick!).

I was hoping to get this done earlier in the week, but only finished last night. It's the way of the world, and I think once you see it, you'll understand why it took a bit longer than I anticipated.

I need to work on a few tools before I can move forward though. Namely, I need to build two tools and update a third:

1.) A tool to export the subtitles out of the SFM projects into a single transcript, both for my own use in editing the final comic, but also in having the foreign languages (Spanish and a splash of Korean) checked to make sure they're correct.

2.) A tool to rename the SFM renders after the shots they're derived from. Some of the comic panels are composed of multiple shots, named things like "shot103-1 BASE" and "shot103-2 XRAY". But when rendered, their filenames are just "comic000103.png" and "comic000104.png". The fact the numbers don't get maintained is the problem. So I need to fix that.

3.) Fix the Comic Layout Generator to not be ungodly slow. It took 7 seconds to update any changes to the Jill comic at 56 panels. This comic has 171 panels, and I suspect the performance hit is exponent, not linear - meaning rather than being 3 times slower, it'll be 9 times slower. Or 7 seconds between changes to 63 seconds between changes.

I don't expect the first two to take more than a day between them. The latter one? I've a few other changes I need to make behind those fixes, and they might prove a challenge.

Once those tools are done, though, the comic should only take a week for me to edit it, and then maybe 3 days to finalize it. So hopefully by this time in 2 weeks, it'll finally be done, and I can jump back into working on the Rachel project!

Good lord has this comic taken longer than I intended it to. I don't even want to imagine how long it'd take if it were an animation project...

Until next week, everyone!