Comic Start (NSFW Prologue - Relax Red!)
Chapter Start (Flames)

Flames | Page 64
Flames | Page 66



*Dinner guests chanting* "Test of strength! Test of skill! Hold the strait, nev-er spill!"
Don't question it, it's a cultural thing :P

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I'll be honest, I'm pretty disappointed in how much time I ended up putting into this page, but I think it's better for it. I knew almost immediately after refreshing my memory of the page plan that I wanted tweak the dialog. The idea to make it a wide was floating there back when I had the idea to do the 'wrong cabinet' panel. There was no shortage of things I wanted to begin introducing and touching on that I could flesh out the dialog so it was easy to fill out the wide plan's extra shots. Maybe a bit TOO easy. It produced a dynamic back-and-forth that quickly divided the page up into a lot of shot frames. This is the closest to an all-squares wide I've done and the time taken certainly shows that. Initially I wanted to use rejected alternative shots to flesh out a few panels that I needed to spread the dialog across. But I found that mostly unsatisfactory. Only one actually used an rejected alt shot, though a couple more did reuse 1 or more character pose static meshes.

The page has its fair share of problems, though. I just could not get some of Yeltsin's expressions to look the way I wanted them. There was a lot of unexpected issues with technical details and poses. The inclusion of the atrium in the background was a spur-of-the-moment idea. I reused the script I developed from before. While I had to fix a couple things to allow it to position, it *mostly* worked exactly as intended and the interior apartment environment slid into its spot like a glove! That said, I encountered a particularly strange issue with the instance clones not having their shaders applied that really took way more time than I wanted. Eventually it was found that Maya's references were the culprit. It's still not clear exactly why they caused it, nor why it only had the problem when reloading the saved scene (nor why the original scene of the atrium constructed for the other pages never seems to encounter the bug.) File referencing continues to be hopelessly problematic and generally not worth it to me. But, the big silver-lining to the debacle was discovering that the instancing process (and thus atrium construction script and reloading saved files of the scene) become phenomenally faster when I don't use Maya's references and just import the objects directly like I usually do for everything else.

The original plan here was for this page to be mostly a story-pusher with one challenge: that drink pouring. Pouring the drink wasn't supposed to be a difficult challenge, just something extra. Unfortunately, my inexperience with pouring from a bottle (I'm a teetotaler tbh) led me to substitute other experiences and allow me to think "yeah that's totally how to do it." That led to the now-obviously-wrong bottle holding pose. I am very grateful for a good friend's suggestion that it be a cultural convention, which inspired the little joke-chant above. Oh, also I doubled the render setting which resulted in it taking 62 hours to render. I got a bunch more poses done while waiting on it, but it definitely was an unwarranted delay. Might look a little prettier for it tho.

The panel that broke me out of the standard page plan was the one of the little inside-joke about ripcord-starter on a nuclear engine. If your curious, the original joke was about a nuclear lawnmower with a laughably inefficient pull-starter. Here it's a ripcord starting a neutron generator which bombards plates of Bismuth-209 to transmute them into Polonium-210 which in turn serves as the emergency nuclear battery, lol.