Story Start (nsfw!)
Flames | Chapter Start
Flames | Page 71
Flames | Page 73

The original Page 69, that is the prior page 71, had a string of revisions in the original planning process and again after I started this sequence. Not only was it very difficult to get the pace and page presence I wanted for events, it was difficult to figure out how to convey what I wanted and the way I wanted. Through them all, it was going to end with an ambiguous panel. Rederick was going to be doing something that was blocked by Yeltsin's muzzle and was supposed to look like he could be nuzzling Yeltsin's muzzle or kissing his cheek and Yeltsin would look like it's everything he ever hoped for.

When I got to page 66 and that exploded, I was stuck with a decision to either keep it the unwieldy giant page of break it up to 3 pages which it fit pretty naturally into. Ultimately, the desire to add in this page was why I chose to let it break into 3 separate pages, even though that meant renumbering all the later page plans, etc. By the time I got here, I had decided screw it: I want them to kiss. Something else can be left ambiguous.

This page started out as a lighting test originally. But in the end, it slid right into place as I wanted. That said, it took over a week to render. Why did page 69 take so long? It was because of this render. I thought I'd knock it out and workout the page poses in parallel. It took 4 days to get to 78% complete. And then the render crashed. I lost the whole render, naturally, save for the FG and Photon files pre-computed. After getting a panel of 69 done, I started it again and tried running some of the other panels of 69 in parallel. When it got through a day or three, I got nervous and cancelled the render. This actually does produce an output file. It could essentially serve as a save state and I could do partial renders of the remaining portions. Those remaining portions themselves took a considerable amount of time, with 6 of them total. I lost track of the last render time, but the sum total render time (not including the crashed run or its FG calculation) was just a little bit over 8 days.