Here We Are Again (Patreon)

As of this week, my contract is finished and my time is my own again. And for the first time in at least a couple of years, I'm thinking seriously about what to do with the free time that I now have, while I have it.

Also for the first time in years, I want to animate Daisy, but that presents some problems. The biggest problem is that I'd only rigged her nude model, but for what I have in mind I'd rather she be fully clothed. Nudity would be too distracting, and it would limit where I can share the animation. Her clothes aren't made to fit over her nude model, so I'd need to copy her base rig to a new file. I'd also be tempted to review that base rig, and either improve or replace it... and right there a task that could take a week or two suddenly balloons into months, and might not even be finished by the time my next contract starts. That's a song & dance I'm far too familiar with...

With Daisy's rig being a no-go for now, the comic will be a priority. The next handful of pages I'd had planned have Alice giving Violet more context on Daisy's Disney incident. Alternatively, I could draw a picture of the entire family in front of the castle, and accompany that with a breakdown of what happened. After that I have a page planned for when Rose gets home from work, because it's about time she got some attention. There are other segments that I'd planned but may need to cut, most of which can be repurposed later. One that I don't want to skip though, pops back into the diner to check in on how Mercy is handling things. After that comes the epilogue, and this story will finally be wrapped up.

Aside from the main comic, I also have a Halloween idea that I should get started on, soon. I'm sure there are several Halloween ideas I've had to skip in recent years, but this one at least is fairly simply.

Metamorphoses also continues to eat up a lot of my time, but I'm close to having the next version of it finished. For weeks now I've been cutting together a version of it that is just the luminance - no color - and that combines multiple captures to reduce visible noise. Once finished, I'll use that to separate out the color so that its noise can be reduced, then recombined for a cleaner image.

A longer-term idea involves gathering more reference for VR projects that might not even happen. Lately I've been nostalgic for how Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland looking in the 1970s and 80s, so I'm tempted to build a model. And that's all the excuse I need to go there, to gather whatever reference I can. Now with the announcement that Tom Sawyer's Island and the Rivers of America will (eventually) be closing, I'm tempted to get reference of them as well. All of this will have to wait until I'm back in Florida, though, which may not be until nearly October.