What started as a simple project has taken a life of its own recently.
Seriously. I finally got off my butt to update the old character designs to the iclone clone cloth 3.0 bodies. For those who weren’t around two years back, the bodies I used for the original Media Elite series were corrupted when iclone 3.0 upgraded to 4.0. It caused production to completely stop for the series I was working on at the time (a youtube version of Universe) and caused me to have to salvage the characters I could, take a step back, and launch what became the Starshine Downs series.
In the time that followed, well, I never got around to upgrading the old characters. I upgraded them as I introduced the characters in Starshine Downs or @insanity, but I never got around to a blanket “all hands on deck” upgrade because I never really had to. Plus, really, I didn’t want to. Those character models are a reflection of what was going on in my life at the time. A lot of old memories are invested in them and I knew that if I ever got around to upgrading them, I’d have to face hard choices about what changes I’d have to make to them.
Long story short: The old bodies worked in standard def. The new bodies are high def. The face creator for the new bodies is significantly different than the old face creator. When making the new characters, well, only a handful of the old faces worked with the new bodies. I tended to salvage who I could for continuity purposes (or when the new face came out looking nothing like the old), but those amounted to a handful of old characters I could use.
When I started this flashback project I realized that I needed to go back and finish the job. I need character models that I can use whenever I do a flashback or reference one of the other series so today I went ahead and spent most of the morning updating over 50 of the old Media Elite characters to the new format (Universe and Starshine Downs updates await another day). Tough choices were made. Some people were changed because they asked to no longer be in the series, some were changed because their faces wouldn’t work with the software, some were changed simply because their characters have evolved into somebody else entirely over the years. In the end, while everyone looks as close to the same as I could, some of the flashbacks are going to be jarring. I thank everyone who did lend me their faces for the old series, and I did salvage who I could, but in the end, hard choices needed to be made. I apologize in advance to anyone outraged/confused/whatever by them, but they had to be done.
In the past I’ve talked about redoing the old issues with new art and layouts to reflect the current series. @insanity was originally going to be a shot by shot update of the old series based on that idea. In fact, the first and second issues of @insanity were pilots for the idea, which I abandoned because frankly, it was too much work at the time and I wanted to tell new stories. Now that I’ve completely streamlined the process (see my last blog) and updated all of the character models, well, there may be progress on this front.
If I take on that project there will be no major rewrites or layout changes. The only thing I’d change is the art, updating the characters to reflect their current names, and removing a few things that never worked (goodbye pin-up issue!). You may see layouts on my facebook page as I experiment with it, but if it happens, none of the revised issues will go up until there’s enough issues done to lock me into the project. I don’t want to abandon things mid-stream, so, yeah, I’ve got a lot of thinking to do about it.
I’d hate to lose the old look, and I’m proud of the work I did on those series, but dang, going back and making them look professional… something to ponder as I head to bed for another night.
I hope all is well with you.
Jim