Comic Report #64.2 - (Patreon)

Hello again!  This week has been further progress on this 600th page.  It will probably take me one more week and change to chew through everything I need to prepare for this animation but right now I am fully in the phase of inking, painting and finalizing assets, so from this point on it's all just downhill until the finish line.  Today I'll talk a little bit about how I am approaching this process and the challenges I'm working around.

When I draw a normal comic page what I'll do is ink the whole thing, drop flat greys, paint a background and then paint in my foreground figures for the whole page.  For this page I'm trying to take everything one panel at a time, to get it entirely complete before moving on to ink and flat the next panel.  I keep all the assets for a panel in a layer folder in Photoshop and use a layer mask to block out all the space around that panel, so if I paint out of the lines or slide an animation asset out of frame it doesn't overlap with another panel.

These pages end up having a lot of moving parts, it feels a bit like being a watchmaker preparing all the little gears and springs to set in place so when I get to the motion phase they all work in sync.  This week's panel, panel 1, is one of the two big detail spikes in this process, since it has a lot of actual tweening animation between Deon and Donna.  All those frames of animation need to be prepared individually, which eats up a big chunk of work time.  Working on gamedev animation for so many years has taught me a few tricks on how to make this look nice while also lightening the workload.

One of the techniques I use in my game animation is called "boiling", where if something is standing still you draw three versions of that still pose to cycle through, and the minor variations in line while redrawing makes the pose look more alive and less stiff.  For Deon and Donna's cycles I needed them to commit to movements that are mostly still, mostly just moving one arm, so my plan to approach them was to do the inked linework three times, copy them and then draw in the new position of the primary animated arm each time.  So for Deon, for example, his entire motion cycle is 9 frames, so inking his core body 3 times, duplicating each one 3 times and then going through and making the small adjustments to sell the arm movement saved me the effort of inking 9 individual poses from scratch..  When I went to paint the figures I had a thought about painting them three times each, but that was a tremendous amount of work above and beyond the inks so I thought to try just keeping the painted layer static and let the outline movement sell the boiling.  A quick mockup look like this:

When compressed down to final page resolution it ends up looking pretty okay, the outlines sell the boiling and the figures look alive.

To make this mockup gif I did a really quick job on the wall bus, editing it to see how an idea looks in practice.  I thought about if I duplicated the bus and incrementally shrank it it might look okay pulling away into the background, but two problems arose in practice: 1) the perspective on the front of the bus isn't right and 2) the shrinking looks kinda weird.  This is gonna require more tinkering to get right but I already got ideas how to fix it.  I made like 20 copies of the bus and at the planned base animation speed it looks like its going too fast, so I either have to double the copies I make- up to like 40 or 50 giant bus assets- or work smarter with fewer assets to get a nice slow backing-up motion out of this bus.  This isn't gonna be my final product, I got another plan to explore.

The biggest challenge and the thing that makes me the most nervous about these pages is the size the photoshop files can reach.  For reference: I draw my comic pages at 800dpi, and they are 9x17" dimensions. Page 500 ended up being a little over 1gb in size all by itself, this page doesn't have as many individual frames as 500 did but it has a few moments that require a lot of individual assets or layers, so I can still see page 600 getting close to that number.  These filesizes get scary when I'm not sure how well my old computer could handle them, but its especially terrifying when I set up the animation and set it up to export as .gif.  There's a few tricks I have in case this process chokes, where I could animate half of it, then the other half, then stitch the two gifs together, but it's still the most nerve-racking part of this whole ordeal.

This week I'll still be working on this monster page.  I expect to get panel 2 done this weekend, but panel 3 is the big difficulty spike before I'm really home free.  There's a ton of little animation details to ink and paint and this week will probably carry me through panel 3, and then the week after that this page should be ready to upload.  Thank you for being patient with the process, once I'm through this it's going to be a big, big sigh of relief.