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Happy belated Hearth's Warming and a not-yet-belated Happy New Year!

Honestly, I did not anticipate the enthusiastic reaction you folks gave to the news of this comic not being dead yet (or that anyone is still checking on my stuff even after this hiatus that had been going on since ancient times), and I hope this change won't curb that enthusiasm. :)

This comic "page" is kind of a prototype version of what I have in mind. I've recently (since last year or so) got into Blender 3D, and discovered that there's an option for making cell-shaded art (thanks to a lot of talented people), and began experimenting on it to see if I can use it to make pony art at all. Fortunately, very talented people already made pony-related models (Lyra's and BonBon's models were made bymythicspeed), so I tried them and got results way better than I anticipated. So I decided to give it a go, since it does speed up the comic-making drastically (figuring out the camera angles (that work with the limited number of vectored poses I had) was always a huge pain for me, but now I can just set up the scene then move the camera around to the right angles). Of course, the raw renders need retouching (enhanced facial expressions and outline errors: sta.sh/01x1za71vb14) afterwards, but that's fairly easy to do.

Another change I'm strongly contemplating is breaking up with the "traditional" long-strip layout (with uniform rectangular panels) and switching to the classic comic-page layout (with irregularly shaped panels). This would also make things a lot faster, because thus far I tried hard to conserve the 'unity' of the scenes with the long series of panels (in pages sometimes 20+ panels long), which was fairly easy to plan out, but also fairly stiff. A classic layout would give me a lot more artistic freedom.

And the third change is, that I might not upload it to tumblr at all anymore, save for a single panel announcing the new page (with dA link). The great upside of being able to read panel-by-panel was that it looked more show-like, but it also meant that I had to painstakingly adjust all panels so the "fluidity" would be preserved (which, again, made the production longer).
On the other hand, I'm also contemplating uploading it to other platforms. Anyone knows a platform aside from what I've been using thus far (tumblr and dA) that I could use? (and not have my pages already, uploaded by awesome and diligent people? You know who you are. :) )

As stated above, I'll make a poll to see if people prefer the unshaded and shaded versions, and work out a style in January that works. I hope to resume the comic in February (tho don't expect weekly updates at first, let's get into a sustainable rhythm).

Upvotes at import: 24 | Stars at import: 17
Posted previously at: 2019-12-31T16:48:32 | Posted previously by: Mildgyth