I for one certainly didn’t, having left you guys in the dark with no updates, and myself spiralling towards the unspeakable limbo of webcomics oblivion (the road to which happens to be paved with every StumbleUpon button I clicked when I should have been working).

Anyway, here’s a song I made:

Point to Having Lived (MP3)

I don’t know if I want to do another recording like this again for a while. It’s hard enough for me to get anything done without the feeling that someone is watching over my shoulder.

Now, if only I could work this fast in realtime…

In the meantime, here’s a little something else I’ve been working on:

On a lighter note, I produced something for animation class that I’m rather pleased with. I hope you enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed animating it:

What’s that? Why yes, this is the sort of stuff I get graded on…

@Mausoom: To answer your question, it takes anywhere from an hour to a whole day to do the artwork for one strip– but not nearly as long as my appalling lack of consistency might suggest…

It probably has something to do with me making images like this:

Also, exams in the form of little colored squares.

This week, I’m going to talk about Blender’s composite node editor.

It’s awesome! You should never render an image in blender without tweaking it in the node editor. Node based post-processing is superior to post-processing in a regular image manipulation program for a number of reasons: It’s non-linear, non-destructive, and it handles color in 32-bit floating point values.

You can also use it to make an image that looks like a map of the London Underground:

Allow me to explain this madness…

After flattening the character shots onto the softened background (more on that later), I get an image, part of which looks like this:

That’s prior to all the other post-pro. Kind of bland, right?

Right. So then, I blur the image, and overlay it onto the original. This is a popular method known as the “instant sex” effect.

Next (and here’s the clever part), I take the alpha channel, reverse it, blur it, and use it to overlay a yellow tint:

Then I do some some color curves…

And that’s it. No GIMP or Photoshop required.

But wait! The glow effect that I applied in the third step kind of drowned out Proc and Fizzik in the last shot:

So I make a quick garbage matte in the texture window:

And use that to diminish the glow effect.

See how “easy” that was? Next week, I’ll explain how a single corrupted pixel caused this weekend’s comic to be delayed by 24 hours.

It’s important to approach this with a healthy degree of contempt.