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Chapter Start: Flames | Page 01

Full size and Color-quality (16-bit) version on Weasyl!

No Text Version Here!
Rejected Shots Here!



Most important? Leader? No, that's just his body that's usually at his sweet desk.

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This one had its fair share of troubles. Delays were largely due to inaccessibility over vacations. It got off to a good start, with a very easy first panel, but I ended up with around 10 versions of that one, trying to decide on the best camera. Ultimately, I had decided on the 7th, which was actually just a rerun of the first version's camera angle with some lighting and parameter tweaks. I had decided that it was important to not explicitly show nudity with Dr. Gravitas as it didn't fit the tone shift of the conversation. It helps focus the page better, especially with so little room for the text. As luck would have it, the 2nd and 3rd frames basically worked out without me having to alter the positions to achieve that. I did have to move Dr. Gravitas a little bit in the 3rd frame as the path taken didn't look right for the sympathetic glance I wanted. Nevertheless, the labcoats were always planned (as mentioned on the prior page). Just wouldn't be Dr. Gravitas without a labcoat, no?

Overall, development was very straight forward, despite some challenges with the last one. The 3rd frame happened to encounter a very strange problem that required 2 reruns with hardly any changes to it. The outputs and everything seemed fine but when it came time for Local Adaption HDR tone mapping, the output was completely black. Not a clue to be honest, but I suspected it had something to do with the lighting conditions of that position, so I tried pointing back a ceiling light at it again. Fumbled that but as I was working though it piece by piece, I figured out the source of it. About 9 pixels on one of Dr. Gravitas' canine teeth were, like, hyper bright. Out of any sort of reasonable range, so much so that any sort of adaption settings made the entire image black, presumably in calculating the range based on those as the far end. Even attempting to clone-stamp over it in 32-bit color space didn't bring it down much, eventually getting the center most to a very high teal color. Baffling. But replace those pixels entire with ones from another tooth nearby, with their own glint, and the Local Adaption works again. That allowed me to just stop with the failed 3rd version by correcting one of the other 2 versions.

Come to think of it the strange hotspots are very teal as well. I wonder if they could be glinting reflections from this hyper bright reflection...