Some technical notes, breaking down CG work, pacing updates. (Patreon)

As you may have noticed in recent updates, I've been using 3D a lot in panels lately. Some of it looks good, some of it looks bad, some of it is completely imperceptible! I'd like to keep all three of these appearances in play. The image of "bad CG" is pretty useful, as an author, and when it looks good, hey, who am I to complain. But even then, things which are totally imperceptible are also good!

This sudden lean on 3D is in part because my arm is busted! It's not totally busted, but I am wearing an elbow brace, like. Full-time when drawing now. It's pretty comfortable, actually. It's got a little airbag on the end that puts pressure on my elbow and it's nice and comfortable. 

Back to 3D, I really like how it turned out in practice. There's a few panels in the latest update that I think are a little bit overboard - particularly the shots of the inside of the Olive Garden ruins after the sprite mode page, but hey, that's life! Sometimes you overshoot things.  

The most interesting and worthwhile thing from this dive into 3D is finding a process for making sprite-mode room layouts. Laying out rooms before was a lot of really rote work where I effectively just drew out isometric cubes on a grid. This was nice and fun, but it made the actual drawing processes sort of terrible. Accounting for perspective and proper layering was a major time sink, and didn't always look that good. 

It's kind of mixed how good this parlor room (seen in Homestuck here, some changes made for ease of finding similar assets, natch) looks - some of the furniture, like the plant in the corner and the chairs look kind of indistinguishable, but the real standouts here are the couch, TV console and the boxes of records, IMO. 

I try not to use sprite mode too much, since it's a matter of like, just not really wanting to finagle sprites and layers, but honestly? It's a good and worthwhile tool. I have a lot of fun making the sprites individually, but placing them in a sprite mode room feels bad. Maybe that'll change! It'll certainly help the rate at which updates come out. 

Speaking of, there's about 150 pages left in ACT 1 ACT 2. These updates are pretty lengthy and messy, so I'm expecting to break them down into smaller bites, so I have plenty of time to work on EOA1 stuff, without a massive break in output. 

It's been about a month since I put up the Jane walkaround demo, and I think that also turned out pretty alright. I had some stuff to say, but it's all technical stuff best left for another post. I've also switched over to using Adobe Animate, since I bought it completely legally I promise. It's actually just... pretty good for collaborating. Most of all, I was actually kind of shocked with how good and useful it is. It's significantly easier than Saola Animate. It makes me almost sad - a lot of my time spent on making animation pages is spent on syncing audio, but Adobe Animate makes that a breeze. It feels like such an upgrade that I feel like a fool for not using it.

Speaking of collaborating, I'm helping out with Vast Error now! There's some exciting things simmering over there, and if you are somehow hanging around in Homestuck fandom in 2022 and haven't read it, go do that!

I think that's all I have to say for now, I'll see you... whenever I have something more to say here again.