May update

The next comic page - and the high-res versions of April's pages - may be a little late. I'm up to my eyeballs in a contract that is both soul-draining, and that should have been done by now if the client could stick to a schedule.

If you remember, last year I was rigging characters in Spine from October to December. And I hated every second of it, because Spine is a terrible program that lacks some basic features that'd make its workflow much more tolerable. Now I'm doing more of the same, for the same client, and hating it at least as much. BUT, at least the job is almost finished, with the worst of it behind me.

Usually when I'm this close to the finish line, I come up with a long list of things to work on. This time, the list is pretty short. Finishing Toxic Candy is priority #1, and after that I want to get my diner model to a point where it can more easily be used for comic backgrounds. And after that... maybe some Zbrushing?

Toxic Candy may be almost finished...  currently there are two more pages ready for ink & color, and I'm hoping to have page 8 drawn before 7 is colored. The story could go on for a few more pages, but 8 can serve as an ending if I need it to.

With any comics, the backgrounds are my least favorite part to work on. Up until now my workflow has been to use screenshots of my diner model, but I still need to trace & color everything in Illustrator. It's a draining process, which I'd like to speed up by getting the diner model to a more finished state. That technically shouldn't take too long - surfaces just need colors & shaders, the walls could use some decorations, and then the entire thing needs to be lit.

One more thing I may work on - a script for porting Spine rigs to and from Maya. I've already started it, but I don't want to put too much into it unless I know for sure that there'll be more work coming from this client. If there is, then creating these rigs in Maya could save a lot of time. If not, then what will be the point?