Week 3

By the third week I was slowly making my way through each page converting them to grayscale. The first few panels took far too long as I realized I began literally painting them in instead of colour dropping the values which is when I paused and wanted to look at some artistic references where the method involved a base layer over which the darkest values were dropped in first followed by mid tones and finally highlighted with the lightest. I made a quick colour swatch from the previous references I collected by adding a black and white filter on them to help me differentiate the background, mid ground and foreground in each shot.

final moments of the reporter as he gazes at the incoming monstrosity

The first page was a total of 15 panels that took two days to get through as I was trying to maintain a consistent art style and level of detail that was not excessive but the bare minimum needed to avoid the composition falling flat. The second page is where I realized my method was not the most effective as the time it took for each panel increased with the complexity of the scene and since this page had 21 with a good ten to twelve minutes into each, I was gradually getting tired of the repetitive nature and level of quality I was trying to maintain.

reporters overlapping in static in a news broadcast

I think it was at this point if I had decided to minimize the detail I would have definitely saved a lot of time that had to now go into the next 30 panels but at this stage I had already made progress to the extent going back was not an option. They did however convey the realism and dramatic effect I wanted to convey.

Blender

The next two shots introduced us to a little tool called the Graph Scale. It was a way to control the movement of the animation on my viewport by simply adjusting the curve of each axis and its rotation. When I tried this I realized a tiny change in the curve drastically affects what I view to the extent my Razorcrest would go swinging in the opposite direction with my camera staring into blank space. It was a tedious process adjusting them on this because unfortunately instead of solving issues with speed and timing it created new ones that in many ways had to be manually fixed again through my carefully placed keyframes.

Another issue I encountered was managing my file size as each save was nearly 2GB and this was eating up my internet and massively slowly down my device to the extent I lost the second Shot I worked on because it kept spinning on attempting to save it from how the file slowed down my system. Molly was able to thankfully resolve the issue by going in and deleting the many textures on the three ships that weren’t even needed since the final renders had to simply be in Solid view. This sped up my process much more and I was able to finally work without any delays.