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Description

AUTUMN SPRING - The Web Comic Series

based on the Autumn Spring novels written by Sam Pettus

copyright © 2018-2021, all rights reserved.

Season 3, Episode 2 (Series Episode 27

"Secondary Involvements"

NEXT --> www.deviantart.com/digitalexpl…

PREV --> www.deviantart.com/digitalexpl…

FIRST --> www.deviantart.com/digitalexpl…

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COMMENTS

Enter Mei. She's a new secondary character for Season Three and is being played by Dead or Alive's Lei Fang. She's Reina Flannigan's niece from back in Japan. You might remember her from "The Party" (Season One, Episode 12). She appears on the very first page and on the intermission page as the only one of the French maid outfit wearing waitresses wearing dark blue instead of black. She's the girl Reina said she was going to hook up Jim Cozort with, per "The Event" (Season Two, Episode 24). That's why she's sitting next to Jim. She's his date for the evening.

Guys, don't you just love having a jealous girlfriend? How many of us have been there and gone through that? (laugh) Fortunately Kimmy is just getting onto Ted. She's not really jealous, as some of us have had to deal with. Boy, ain't that fun? (knowing wink)

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Now for a little production note. I'm trying something new starting with this episode, in case you haven't already noticed. I'm borrowing a technique from Japanese manga artists (and game creators) and using shadow people for unimportant bachkground characters, crowd and street scenes, and so on. Look at the first panel on this page and at the booth behind where everyone's sitting to see this. It's partly an artistic thing and partly a practical way of lessening the processing load on XNALara XPS, since it doesn't have to eat up a lot of memory with both the actual 3D model and the textures of unimportant characters and such. I'm using my ported and rigged Resident Evil Outbreak gameplay resolution characters, since they average only 2000 polys per character model or less, and I've retextured the entire set with a very basic 4-pixel-by-4-pixel off-black texture. I use off-black instead of straight black so can see some of their details, and that way you don't get a lot of black holes on the page. I tried something like this with the Star Trek - New Vistas episode "On Thursday We Leave For Home" using Sega's Persona series ported crowd models and it really helped things out in production. I can already tell a big difference, as I can load a few more higher-res main and secondary characters, or more objects (like the drinks) into a posed scene than before by using those 2000-poly shadow people models for all of the backfill characters, and thereby putting off a visit from our dear friend Major Lag even longer than before. The shadow people technique is something you may want to try yourself with either those or other low-poly character models, or do it with your hi-res characters for storytelling purposes. Remember, all you need is one single 4-pixel-by-4-pixel off-black texture for the entire character model you want to turn into a shadow person -- and the lower poly it is, the better. Oh, and another advantage to using shadow people instead of textured character models is I don't have to worry anymore about repeating characters in crowd scenes and such. All of the extras are shadow people (textured off-black), so who's gonna know unless they look really hard? The average person isn't. That's another plus on the production side.

Description

AUTUMN SPRING - The Web Comic Series

based on the Autumn Spring novels written by Sam Pettus

copyright © 2018-2021, all rights reserved.

Season 3, Episode 2 (Series Episode 27

"Secondary Involvements"

NEXT --> www.deviantart.com/digitalexpl…

PREV --> www.deviantart.com/digitalexpl…

FIRST --> www.deviantart.com/digitalexpl…

--------------------

COMMENTS

Enter Mei. She's a new secondary character for Season Three and is being played by Dead or Alive's Lei Fang. She's Reina Flannigan's niece from back in Japan. You might remember her from "The Party" (Season One, Episode 12). She appears on the very first page and on the intermission page as the only one of the French maid outfit wearing waitresses wearing dark blue instead of black. She's the girl Reina said she was going to hook up Jim Cozort with, per "The Event" (Season Two, Episode 24). That's why she's sitting next to Jim. She's his date for the evening.

Guys, don't you just love having a jealous girlfriend? How many of us have been there and gone through that? (laugh) Fortunately Kimmy is just getting onto Ted. She's not really jealous, as some of us have had to deal with. Boy, ain't that fun? (knowing wink)

---------------------

Now for a little production note. I'm trying something new starting with this episode, in case you haven't already noticed. I'm borrowing a technique from Japanese manga artists (and game creators) and using shadow people for unimportant bachkground characters, crowd and street scenes, and so on. Look at the first panel on this page and at the booth behind where everyone's sitting to see this. It's partly an artistic thing and partly a practical way of lessening the processing load on XNALara XPS, since it doesn't have to eat up a lot of memory with both the actual 3D model and the textures of unimportant characters and such. I'm using my ported and rigged Resident Evil Outbreak gameplay resolution characters, since they average only 2000 polys per character model or less, and I've retextured the entire set with a very basic 4-pixel-by-4-pixel off-black texture. I use off-black instead of straight black so can see some of their details, and that way you don't get a lot of black holes on the page. I tried something like this with the Star Trek - New Vistas episode "On Thursday We Leave For Home" using Sega's Persona series ported crowd models and it really helped things out in production. I can already tell a big difference, as I can load a few more higher-res main and secondary characters, or more objects (like the drinks) into a posed scene than before by using those 2000-poly shadow people models for all of the backfill characters, and thereby putting off a visit from our dear friend Major Lag even longer than before. The shadow people technique is something you may want to try yourself with either those or other low-poly character models, or do it with your hi-res characters for storytelling purposes. Remember, all you need is one single 4-pixel-by-4-pixel off-black texture for the entire character model you want to turn into a shadow person -- and the lower poly it is, the better. Oh, and another advantage to using shadow people instead of textured character models is I don't have to worry anymore about repeating characters in crowd scenes and such. All of the extras are shadow people (textured off-black), so who's gonna know unless they look really hard? The average person isn't. That's another plus on the production side.