Page 1252…
Today is one of those days that I wish I wasn’t doing a “page a day” story.
I really wanted to research scorched grounds, fire, smoke, and more for this page.
10 hours to produce this page with no research really (I feel) doesn’t do it justice.
I may revisit this page.
But for fun…I thought I’d show you what the computer “spit out” so you can see how much photoshop went into it.
Anyways.
Hope you enjoy.
And will (hopefully) see you tomorrow.
🙂
Scott
Oh noes!
I hope Alex finally learned how to help the others fly!
Nicodemus is such a freaking coward.
This is either going to end very well or very bad…
I bet Alex woke up, like we wake up from falling dreams, with a start. If the blast was directed enough, maybe the others are ok. Doesn’t seem like Scott to kill off a bunch of main characters.
flying stance reminds me of someone… but i cant quite put the finger on who >,<
Or maybe somewhere in the middle.
This is going to be interesting…
You’re kidding, right? Meat Loaf’s ‘Bat Out of Hell’ album cover, by ’70s uberartist Richard Corben.
But Alex still needs to get revenge on the prince and marry Buttercup! (Oh wait… wrong story)
See! I said Nick would get out of this somehow.
…so Nicodemus lived happily ever after, and that’s the end of the story!
Yes.
Woo hoo!
If Alex woke up, I’d kill him. I need to know the fate of everyone.
LOVE the Photoshop effects! What the comp produced is way too plain.
I finally caught up with all of the comic, but now it’s a cliffhanger! Nooooo! Well, it’s a very good cliffhanger and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Wow, Panel 2 is absolutely gorgeous! …wallpaper? Please? 🙂
I love that you shared what the computer “spit out.” It’s amazing how much work goes into the final product. Thanks, Scott!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
Scott!!!!! your cliffhangers are really, really stupid!!!!!!!!!!!!
please let us know what happend to them tomorrow!!!
please!!!!!
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
Yes, change the first panel. Anything that becomes very hot would let off steam in a pouring rain.
….not to mention incidental smoke.
agree – there is no way scott is killing off a bunch of major characters. nick seems foolish to believe he succeeded so easily, when fire breathing alone never won him alex’s hide before, with that awesome armor he’s got.
question to scott – i am no graphic artist, but…why can’t you past the rain as a layer onto many of your new panels? after having painted the rain with depth multiple times, can’t some of those layers suit new settings? i’d rather you pared it down to four comics a week when you need to focus and get something right. you’re right that it’s a LOT of work/hours for one page, but your book is a labor of love. take the time to keep kicking a#$ and taking names.
p.s. a lot of your ads link to other comics. several of these comics have become regular reads for me!
Did someone have the cloak of invisibility?
Tomorrow not too far away. %)
Reminds me of the world’s shortest fairy tale:
“Once upon a time, they all lived happily ever after.”
That version lacks a certain dramatic tension also.
The quality of the ending could depend on the perspective of the observer. Then it could be good and bad and also neither good nor bad.
Yeah there would be steam but unless water is being poured on the fire the steam would be largely a light haze around the flames. I think the feel of the panels are put off far more by the lighting. With the size of that fire and the darkness of the sky that fire would likely put out 2 or so stops above ambient light. It would also toss a nice orange glow across the scene.
Black smoke is indicative of an oxygen starved fire. You see this very fast fires, like when you use gas or the fire is big enough to starve itself of immediate oxygen. It works for the second panel but the first seems a bit of an overkill.
Now that I have made myself look like a pyromaniac. Take with a grain of salt, I am a photographer but not a great illustrator.
Also love your work. Keep up the great work and thanks!
Scott killed off the Jolly Green Giant. We still do not know what he did to Staji’s parents. It is probably to horrible to show. Scott needs to keep his G rating.
I feel for you. I caught up a few Fridays ago. I had to wait all weekend!
i knew nic would come out of it without a scratch since he is a dragon. i hope alex and the others are okay.
i think your did the smoke and fire fine in here. i like nic’s epic take off.
So I’ve been slowly catching up to the rest of ya’ll and you leave me on a cliffhanger…and geesh, what a huge cliffhanger! I’m dieing here…
Epic leap by Nic. Totally kick-bad.
Nic is way too confident in himself… He is now assuming that “No one could survive that”… And we all know how well that usually works…
At the very least, he should search through the rubble to make sure they’re dead. Not that I want him to, of course, because he would then find them all safely under Alex’s energy shield, and would try to kill them again… I’m just saying that strategy-wise, one should never assume that whatever blow they just dealt has finished their enemy.
I have no doubt as to the survival of our intrepid freedom fighters under there, but I’m having trouble determining what I’m seeing here in the first panel. It appears as though the roof’s fallen in but I thought the roof was cone shaped, this roof looks rectangular. Did the outer roof blow off, and is that it over there in the background? And what is the dust/pebbly looking stuff just this side of it all?
As for Nic, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings, bubba.
The poses in this one, the dialogue (or near lack thereof) and especially the Photoshop effects (I wonder if that would be possible to do in Gimp… not like I’d try it, I’m much more used to PS’s UI). All together they make an excellent comic.
Great work, Scott!
He’d probably retort something like, “Pragmatism is often mistaken for cowardice by those blinded by that fossilized concept, honor.”
i think the dwarf king shielded them all :3 he’s big enough, but at that he might have or be dieing right now from the burns etc, he’s a rock man, not necessarily fire
wow!
Seems ole nick woulda been hit by the enormous amount of rubble coming down.
That being said, it’s a bit odd he could explode a stone tower with one breath of fire.
It used to drive me crazy when we had a cliffhanger every Friday. Now it’s every day. Scott is the most evil twisted genius ever. Keep up the good work.
ok he needs to dream nick into a forest of dragons bane for that one
Hey guys…
Thank you so much.
I’m still VERY unhappy with this page.
If I had the time (and money) I think modelling this scene destroyed (complete with proper chunks of the roof and real smoke) would make this so much better.
So much is going on these days. The movies, the ipad app, I’m writing some new books, etc.
I’m having a hard time getting ahead at all.
Please forgive me if Friday’s page is late again.
Yeah, did some googling when I saw your comment.
Doesn’t look anything like that cover.
Unless Nic magically turns in to a motorcycle and changes his angle by about 20 percent maybe?
Or is he supposed to be the perched bat?
Don’t see that either.
He does kind of remind me of Neo, from the Matrix, when he flies though.
Dramatic tension? Hmmm… How about this?
“Once upon a time… … they lived happily ever after.”
Better, yeah? *grins*
Also… PLEASE a desktop of the second panel! Please please please?
Thx! ^.^
Nobody will mind Scott, we would appreciate the comic much more if you take all the time you need to get stuff out of the way. That way there won’t be anything stoping you from making the comic as good as it can be.
PS, (even if the quality is not how you would like it to be, I doubt anyone will notice. Your own work always looks worse to you than it actually is)
You’re not allowed to appolgize. The way I see it, you’re doing us a favor by showing us this amazing story. If anything, we should be appologizing to you.
Just take as much time as you need to sort out everything, and know that your fans all over the world support you no matter what.
I think that the artwork works well enough. For accuracy’s sake a few more environmental touches could be added, but by and large the point is made.
So, Nicodemus thinks that his foes are crispy critters now. Pretty foolish of him not to verify that.
I suspect that, somewhere under that pile of flaming debris, Alex may have found another unexpected trick of his mystical armor that enables him to protect Nastajia and Bognok. Much like the one he discoverd the first time that dear Nic tried to flambe’ the lad. http://thedreamlandchronicles.com/the-dreamland-chronicles/chapter-06/page-363/
that “before” would have been a great vote incentive.
I agree with Solarayne.
We have to thank you.
We have to apologise to you if we don’t click an ad a day.
We have to apologise to you if we can’t vote on a particular day.
You are doing us a tremendous great favour.
THANK YOU, Scott!
Wow… that’s what the computer spit out? Eek!
And no need to apologize… you work so hard, take all the time you need~
Of course they’re alive. Sadly “good” (which really depends on the point of view, I think by bodycount alone Nic is certainly the lesser evil compared to the silly human) usually wins in such stories.
I would argue that Nic isn’t even evil. He simply knows from experience how bad humans can be. Sure, Alex might be a decent king. But what about the guy coming after him? Or after that one? Eventually there’ll be another rotten apple like Arthur.
And remember, as it was in Arthur’s case… Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you! I mean, if I went ’round saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
I agree! The changes between the spit out and the final version are incredible!!
THIS JUST IN!!!
I saw a note in the local newspaper that TEEN VOGUE has (unintentionally) made A TRIBUTE TO The Dreamland Chronicles!!!
On the front page of their March issue, young star Ashley Green poses with a NASTAJIA NECK! Yes, it is elongated!!! Look for yourself, you can use search engines or paste this into your web browser: http://www.teenvogue.com/
You know there are people who like to help you render this stuff right?
Maybe some of us could try to make a similar scene with these effects in it, and you could use those.
What resolution do you render at?
I don’t understand what these panels show.
Is it Nic flying around of the burned towertop?
Or the tower is reduced to a site of smoking ashes after his fire breath?
Or this scene is inside the room where all the characters are present, then Nic used his fire breath and destroyed the walls of the towertop?
And how he managed to fly away in time?
I think that some critical story elements are missing here.
too horrible to show? hahahaha! you really got a belly laugh for that one. like you said, g-rated. it’s not JUST for kids, but it’s appropriate for kids and family-friendly. so it’s not going to have such a tragic ending as what we see on today’s page – which is pretty horrible in truth on web, as a cliffhanger. i bet the next few pages will ease our minds though.
Nicodemus knows he’s defeated. He’s just a very sore loser.
“No, they can’t be dead!”
“What?”
“They can’t be dead, they escaped and kicked the dragons butt!”
“Who is reading the story here? Do you want me to stop?”
“No, go on”
“Now, where was I…”
I just knew there had to be a Princess Bride reference in there somewhere.
THX
I think it’s pretty straightforward actually, but basically, in the first panel Nic is standing in what REMAINS of the room, look carefully at the right hand side and you’ll see a little of what’s left of the wall facing the village (remember they saw the explosion coming out towards them from the top of the tower!?!)
So in other words, he ‘flamed’ them so hard that the half of the room that was facing the village has essentially been destroyed (also, if you check out Scott’s before and after it may help you, as the structural detail was clearer before all the weathering/effects).
In the second panel, he is simply flying away from said room, and in effect, the tower itself. Hope that clears it up. Nic is big, yes, but he isn’t THAT big, I think you just got thrown by the first image because you didn’t make the walls out properly. 😉
ANYWAY, what I actually wanted to say is your effects were awesome on this page Scott, and as a fellow artist/designer (nowhere near your level though ^_^) I too know what it’s like to feel you could have ‘done more’. But honestly, it looks great, and that last panel especially is really something. I’m sure you could have done more if you’d have had more time, but it looks really nice all the same. 🙂
Much better than my attempt at a PB ref. 😉
I think he looks a little like the Hermes FTD uses
Um, I’m pretty sure he’s thinking of Iron Man, since he just said stance, not actual appearance.
i didn’t notice it before, but you’re right – i see it now. the smoke is not perfect like the rest of the art. i have to agree -completely- with solarayne and krull, though.
Thanks, A.C. Makes sense now. That’s quite a pile of rubble there. I’m thinking Alex has discovered he can teleport. Scott, no worries, great art is worth waiting for. And thanks for such an enjoyable comic!
Doesn’t Alex’s armor protect him from exactly that?
I’m surprised you were even able to post, considering all that you’ve got going on, Scott! I still think it’s a good page, seeing that most of us get the idea of what is going on. I could see you going back and perfecting it for the sake of the book, but (as for now) I’m just glad to see what’s going on!
OMG, that’s horrible! Why do they have to photoshp the humanity out of everyone? Idiots.
I still can’t get over how gorgeous Panel 2 is.
Please update soon!!!
Scott, how long did it take your computers to render out those two panels? Just out of curiosity
Here’s a direct link to the Nastajia-necked cover:
http://media.onsugar.com/files/2011/01/05/1/346/3463885/94f8324f1811edf7_ashleygreene_teenvogue_march2011.jpg
If we could get the two pics on higher resolution, this would make nice wallpapers.
I vote we see kiwi do a little fairy magic force field saves everyone lol it would be high time to see what her magic can do don’t you think?
Seconded. 🙂
Of corse knowing this comic it would be fairy force field
Alix: thanks for the save kiwi
Kiwi wobles in mid air falls to the ground
All: Kiwi? KIWI!
Tune in Monday for the next…
Collective scream from readers lol
Also just wanted to say nice work Scott it’s nice to find a web comic I can share with my kid 🙂
Indeed awesome wallpaper. 😀
lol either that or everyone is fine from Alex’s magic flame shield thingy but no one can find Alex… then we see him monday…he woke up.
Hear hear!
I agree with RJ. I’ve been trying to tell you that for a bit now, Scott.
I think that moment would be a VERY inopportune time for him to wake up. Everything disappears with him, including any “magic flame shield thingy” meaning the rest are left vulnerable. Unless, that is, as Boren suggests, Kiwi is able to pull some sort of fairy magic miracle.
Welcome. ^_^
Yeah, I was thinking the same, either he’s learned/discovered teleportation or his shield has the ability to cover a variable area, certainly the way his armor ‘projected’ the shield to deflect Nic’s flame the last time they fought in Astoria seems to imply that ability.
Kiwi could also have a hand in that, she certainly has the power to deflect things and can also carry a fully grown Alex through the sky, so she’s strong that’s for sure, but like anything I’m sure her magic has it’s own limits (just like Alex’s armor does, vs the sword of kings for example).
Super excited to find out what really happened on Monday! 🙂
Thats awesome!
Thanx A.C.!
Even a few plumes of white (and/or dark) fumes coming up from between the largest of the rocks would make the first panel look more authentic.
Isn’t overconfidence a characteristic of villains along with monologing and overly-elaborate death traps?
True that.
Ok, that makes two referenced pages this week that I didn’t really remember. Methinks it’s time I reread this thing from the beginning again XD
Scott dearest, two things if I may…?
ONE.
Dude, you’re an artist. Please, enlighten us… when was the last time you felt satisfied with your own work?
(and now that I’m asking for the impossible, I would also like to ask for a 4th Dimensional Pony-Shaped Rainbow Scone, thank you very much).
Time is our friend in this profession, never our mistress. Chill.
TWO.
I feel there’s only one thing I’d add to this whole page and that is another… um… ugh, forgot word. Anywho, an image of a zoom in of Nico sayin’… “what the…?” or something like that, specifically his eye, which is bright and glowy and can reflect a little bit of the other characters (or a really large pissed off Dwarf King coming upstairs and fast, whichever suits yer fancy).
Now you go and ROCK in your projects, you hear me? 😀
We all love you! [and may the kids be ok in this ungodly weather, as the missus].
Tomorrow is more farther away than I thought
First and foremost, loving every bit of this comic and I continue to enjoy it more each day. It really added something to look forward to at the end during my deployment.
Secondly, I love the panels. Devastation and believed victory flight adds tons of suspense and looks pretty awesome. If anything on the first panels that sort of bothered me was the size of the rubble pile. It seems too small to bury our beloved heroes, but perhaps this is a trick to the eye because of Nic’s size in ratio to the rubble.
I meant Alex woke up AFTER the explosion, but just barely.
i follow the samurai way of honor. no, not the story version, the pragmatic approach.
as i summed it up to a friend who watched me retreat from a group of enemies on a game.
“i’m brave, not suicidal…”
Staj’s parents are being tortured in a deep dank dungeon…..
with FEATHERS!!! yes! their noses and toe-ses be feeling the bitter itchy-tingly sensation of the most heinous of torture devices!!
(sad thing is i actually saw this happen in a kids show that was based off of a book that had adult themes like torture…)
alls ive got to say (other than what has been said) is that i want to see a GOOD dragon in some fantasy setting….. i mean even in the new elder scrolls game the dragons are the bad guys!! WTF!? where be the chinese mythology wise-all-knowing-protectors/benefactors to humanity? sigh. i guess dragons are the penultimate over-powered enemy…
Also, can this rendering be split into smaller independent jobs? Lots of people donate their computers’ resources to projects like SETI@home, and the CGI folks have been using render farms instead of single computers for decades. Probably we could help. (If whatever software it takes can run in Linux, I know I would.)
Wow, that is really a lot of photoshop!! That`s lots of work there Scott, it looks awesome! Especcially with the burning pile in the background. wow…..I hope they are ok.
there are a couple of good dragons (bad ones too) in daqueran, a beautifully painted fantasy comic. i’m linking to it for you here!
what was the kids’ show? i posted a reply to your dragons’ post, but i think it might have been lost. click the link in my name for daqueran comic. your wish is my command. so beautifully done, too. a fantasy webcomic in watercolors? genius!
^^^^
yes do that. AFTER you right this wrong in the comic. for some reason, i see nicodemus fling from a pile of rubble (i think) instead of alex stabbing him and celebrating in the middle of his villain monologue
Well in D&D there are plenty of good dragons and they fill rolls as wise sages, just rulers, wealthy patrens, and powerful oricals all in turn. It just depends on what any individual author needs at the time. That said there are still plenty of maiden munching, county side burning evil ones too. Just a matter of what the story needs
Dragons are evil. Nothing to it buddy, nodda, zilch. You walk up to a ‘good’ dragon, (if there were realy ones) and see if you wont be eaten.
dugeons and dragons suck!
Oh, it easily can be split into different jobs with the right software. Although, I’d need to know what Scott’s using to render first before I could recommend software.
I dunno…something about the render times (when Scott’s told us the computers are having trouble with the picture, etc) seem off to me.
Yes, a lot of it depends on the rendering software, and the computers themselves, but still…
I’ve done quite a bit of rendering and the longest I’ve EVER had to wait was 30 minutes per frame, and that was because my models had a LOT of extra lines in them that made it harder to render. Cleaned them up and I was down to 5 minutes. I’m wondering if a similar problem is happening here.
Y’know, I really hope the way Alex reveals himself to Nic that he survived is by jumping him mid-flight. Like “SUH-PRIZE, B****H!”
What about the ‘Dragonheart’ movies?
D&D dose not suck! It is a great game and it helps you learn reading,math,and teaches you to think on your feet! Plus it helps you learn how to multi-task,especially if you can control up to and maybe over five characters *cough*me*cough*
Well, from experience: with the wrong software, or the wrong settings you can literally render weeks for one frame…
And animation can take moths on one pc at high resolution.
Just saying, long render times are relative.
Is it me or am I missing a page?
What happened to Friday? Did it vanish? A whole day, just lost to the world?!
Oh noes!!!
Let’s hope that Monday will bring salvation!
There’s also eragon. There are books about ‘good’ dragons. I only found one comic, though.
It drwas you in and then warps over your mind.
True, True. I remember Kerkythea… *shudders* That’s what we were using before we discovered Blender. Of course, we were making things in Sketchup, and that by itself is asking for it as well.The transfer to Blender by itself helped a lot…getting rid of the extra vertices helped even more.
What I meant, RJ, was half hour was the longest I had to wait for one frame at 1080p before I optimized everything. Got it down to 8 minutes after that…
Just be glad you’re not doing Iron Man, Scott, lol. There’s information that Iron Man himself took about 5-6 hours to render per frame because of how much geometry there was in him.
Yes, we are missing a page. Scott seems to be either taking advise and researching more or is having issues with rendering… *shudders at remembering all the memory allocation errors he had to deal with when learning*
I agree too. THANK YOU!!!!
One thought on the smoke trailing off of Nicodemus’ wings: the trail is going straight back along his line of flight, but if his wings were flapping the smoke would trace the path of the wings as they beat back and forth while lifting Nicodemus up.
As the wings are currently in “raised” position the smoke trail and its vortices should be following from the lower left to the trailing edge of Nic’s wings.
or maybe he forgot
He just jumped to get off the ground and hasn’t started flapping yet ok? Now shhh or you’ll cost us Monday’s page too. Lol 😉
He killed off the Jolly Green Giant so he wouldn’t have to eat his broccoli and spinach?
Luckily, after extensive tutoring by Orion and the centaurs, Alex can control his sleeping and waking.
Yay for happy endings! I always liked dragons. Now I can on with my life again!
I think taking your own photos of fire with a high resolution camera and then fine tuning the details based on those photos would really bring this page home and give it that extra oomph.
Welcome, fellow Dreamer!
Welcome, another fellow Dreamer!
😉
If there were ever a BOINC project for helping Scott render pages, I would definitely join …
(Currently helping with the SETI@home and Einstein@home projects.)
😉
Oh, look! A Troll! Now where did I put my Wand of Fireballs …
😉
First of all, I’d like to say, as always, you do an excellent job, Scott! I always love your work and know how hard it can be with a lot on your plate. So as your readers have shown, we love and appreciate all the hard work you do.
Secondly, as a working of my bad eyes and weird brain, I had to reread this comic twice today and did a double-take on the panels when I was reading this without my glasses. In panel one, look directly right of the leftmost flame. That dark patch between the flames. Anyone else see a torso and legs silhouette? I swear I thought I saw someone burning! I had to look closer!
In the second panel, and this is just how odd my brain is, I had a laugh at Nic. The pose and the purple on his legs, at first glance made it look like he was wearing a purple skirt and had really short legs. >.< lol I don't see the skirt as easily on actually looking, but for a brief moment, I was wondering "why is Nic wearing a skirt?"
……Meaning…?
Oh,no! You’re not one of those ppl who think that D&D is evil are you?!?!?! O_O
Inconceivable!
😉
Not the bike, the bat on the tombstone he’s leaping over. Also the similar demon on the ‘Bat Out Of Hell 2″ cover. Or maybe I’m the only one who sees it; I’m a product of my times.
Nicodemus: “Good riddance. Now I wonder if McCaffrey is still hiring.”
real afeact fire
Sometime back in the comments, I think it was specified as PG.