Monday Comics – Return of THE LIFE-TAKER pt 3

Hypertransitory Monday Comics, episode 22 -part 3 of The Return of The Life-Taker!

Return of THE LIFE-TAKER: Conclusion

It’s been a while since the last installment, so if you missed it or need a refresher go back to check out The Return of the Life-Taker – part 2, then get back here to read the conclusion!

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JG’s CREATOR NOTES

So I guess that taught her a lesson.

As we can see, the Life-Taker lives up to his name and takes his job seriously. Coming at him with some half-assed deal may get you some face-time with his axe.

While creating this character, I was influenced by several bad-ass characters I’ve read who may be tough as nails, but underneath it all they have that heart of gold.

The Life-Taker doesn’t really have that heart of gold, though. This is a guy who’s out for himself and pretty much doesn’t give a crap about anyone else.

I considered having the Elf survive, but short of her literally running away I just couldn’t see how it would be possible. Neither one is the type that would ever think they would lose a fight.

So since the Life-Taker sure as hell isn’t getting killed, it had to be her. Sorry, nameless Elf.

On a technical note, this comic is officially the longest one ever. I know I say that every week, but it’s true, this one is the longest Monday Comic at 10440 pixels tall. Holy Crap!

This is one of those times where working with an editor would be a blessing and a curse.

I wanted to wrap this story up finally, so I literally had to throw everything into this one comic -even though I could have easily broken this up and stretched it out for another week.

Without having to answer to an editor (or the limitations of a physical format like a newspaper or comic book) I was free to essentially overload this comic until the story was done.

3D DRAMA

As I’ve been complaining about here (and on Twitter and Facebook), the problems I’ve had making this comic have escalated to legendary status.

I use Daz Studio to create this comic, at least for the character creation and posing of the characters. Photoshop and Illustrator are used later for effects, layout and lettering.

Anyway, for some reason this round of Life-Taker comics has been nothing but trouble. The very first Life-Taker didn’t cause any real problems, so I was pretty surprised to be having such difficulties with this one.

By problems I mean constant, incessant freezing and crashing of Daz Studio. Sometimes the program takes exception to certain props or “morphs” (where you change the shape of a character as opposed to merely their size) and it may freak out.

I suspect the introduction of the Elf character is what the problem was, since I had trees, buildings and the horse in the first comic. Unfortunately as you can see, I needed that Elf  so I couldn’t just drop her from the story.

That meant I had to inch along with every panel, saving after almost EVERY change I made. These 3D scenes do not save quickly, sometimes it might be 2-3 minutes per save, and if you changed a lot in the scene, the saves can get upwards of 8-10 minutes!

So imagine I’m constantly doing that, but still I have to live in fear that every time I click on something the program might crash, losing all my work, or freeze -which amounts to the same thing since I have no choice at that point but to force quit the program and lose all the work anyway.

Normally I like to multi-task while I’m working, but to minimize crashing I’d taken to closing all other programs, even my email program, then restarting, so every bit of ram was free and clear for Daz Studio to use.

Oh, and to waste more time, I spent a day and a half or so poring through the forums hoping to discover a fix, but I couldn’t really find a fix or workaround that alleviated the problem.

I finally gave up on that and decided this damn thing just had to get done by force of will, so screw it.

As a result of this torment, there might not be any more 3D comics for quite a while, until I can figure out what the problem is and get it taken care of.

Just to note: I’m using Daz Studio 3. Daz Studio 4 has been out for a little while now, but I haven’t upgraded. When I get some time I plan to go ahead and upgrade, the maybe I can leave all these problems behind. It’s not guaranteed, but I’m hopeful.

BEHIND THE SCENES

So finally, as usual there are no raw pencils on these 3D comics, but here’s some more screenshots of the working Daz Studio environment, and some raw renders so you can compare to the final product. Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts in the comments!

Thanks for reading! I hope you guys enjoyed it. Let me know what you thought in the comments and see you next time!