Finished the Easter story today. Then futzed around for an hour with some test images that will be for a story ... eventually. (That was pure recreational futzing, a little fun break before dinner.) Then began the figure (re)design for the first Quitclaim story.

You see I can't actually let that part of my brain sit idle for a moment. These days, if I do that, it'll just tailspin about ... you know [gestures around broadly].

As I said the day before yesterday, the next project, which I hope to be able to cram into the next two weeks, is a remake of the first Quitclaim story. It's not a bad story (even though it's very unlike all the other Quitclaim stories in tone); in fact I am very fond of it ... so fond of it that I need to rescue it from the many, many bad decisions I made at the time. I didn't really know what I was doing, and I didn't have the full range of tools that I do now. The current version of the story probably doesn't get finished by very many people, simply because some of the choices I made actually make it difficult to read. I mean visually.

But here's the thing: I didn't keep files.

Normally, I'll keep files for any figures I think I may need to use again if there is some custom aspect of that figure that would be too painful to redo (like, if it's a mix of ten different figures, which often happens, or if they have surfaces that I spent an hour tweaking to get the look I wanted). If it's a figure that was just a straight load (that is, of a purchased kit, unaltered), I'll just leave myself a note instead with the instructions, and save on disk space. "Isadora Brass has no base because she's just [RawArt's] Isadora figure plus blue Chaotic hair."

Same deal with sets; most of the sets I use are either straight loads, or have minor alterations after load where I can just leave myself a note ("adjust all emissive ceiling lights to 10000 kcd"), but if the sets are kitbashes or took an hour of custom relighting work, then I'll save the set so I can get it back easily ... again, if I think I may need it again. Ruby's apartment is a splice of six sets. It took me a whole afternoon to do.

But I didn't save anything for the first Quitclaim -- well, nothing specific to that story. (Randa and her ship Bosie have save files, of course, but those don't count.) The story takes place entirely on a space station which is a straight load, the lighting adjustments are "turn everything but the emergency lights off," and [spoiler!] there was no point saving bases of any of the other characters who appear, because none of them make it out of the story alive and thus there's no chance we'd ever see them again.

So I had to redesign three -- well, four, one of them has two versions which are different enough from one another that they're separate files -- characters tonight, working from the original story pages as a visual reference because it's all I had, trying to match those reasonably closely.

I don't regret the time spent. They don't look exactly the same as they did before, but they came out better. As I say, in 2021 I had a lot less to work with.

Tomorrow I will begin actual renders. We cannot stand still.