Production Notes

This is one of the behind the scenes rooms in the resort and written from the creator's perspective. These are the production notes that are posted after each episode is published.

This behind the scenes area is split between a few rooms to keep it organized:

• The News Stand: An archive of site updates
• Production Notes Archive: ← You are here
• WIP Archive: An archive of WIP posts that were made while an episode was in production.

Episode 43

7 Oct 2024

This episode adapts page 107 of the previous comic version with new scenes. The first scene was intended to be the end of episode 42 but it was so long that parts of it were split off into this episode twice!

I struggled to come up with a title for this episode, but the one I chose might be fitting because it’s more to the point and somber, reflecting the somber situation at the start of it.

The scene of Ella and Cam stepping outside of the hotel is a lead-in to the battle above them, and this was my favorite of the new scenes to create because of how it bridged the last scenes in the hotel and the battle scenes together.

At the time of publishing this, it's October and I would've loved to participate in art challenges this month but I'm not sure if I will. When the month started, my first art priority was finishing this episode. I also have updates for my other project that'll be ready to publish.

That can be (re)arranged

As it was mentioned in the last WIP, I re-arranged the panels of the fight scene this episode adapts. The panel of the blast was oriented horizontally on that page to fit the flow of the page format but I oriented it vertically in the webtoon since the attack would take up more of the screen. It also seemed to make sense since webtoons have a vertical format.

This panel was from the previous version. I split it into two panels in the webtoon since it seemed too cramped to keep that as one panel. Midnight's reaction panel shows her appearing to be smaller because she's further away from the camera in this shot.

If this scene had been animated, I'd imagine that after Princess fired that attack, the screen would cut to Red Alert dodging it then Midnight dodging it too because they were both in the same area, but that Midnight was further from the camera.

This scene is also an opportunity to show how I use gradients within Inkscape for many of the scene transitions:

Gradients are at the top and bottom of this panel and I selected the top one in this screenshot. It's in a rectangular object the same width as the episode and the gradient is vertical with the top stop matching the background of the previous scene at 100% opacity and the bottom stop being the same color but 0% opacity.

The bottom gradient works the same way but in reverse; the top stop has 0% opacity and leads to a bottom stop with 100% opacity that matches the background of the next scene.

TV effects in Blender

These processes work for illustrations but I can't generalize to animation because I haven't tried that yet and I know there'd be other steps that'd need to be taken to animate the effects.

The TV screen: I create separate screen materials for when the TV is off and for each scene that will be shown when it's on. The screen material used when the TV is off is a simple reflective glassy black material with a gradient.

When the screen was on, I plugged the Color of an Image Texture node into the Base Color and Emission color of the Principled BSDF node. I adjusted the Emission strength to give enough of a glow to the screen.

Captions and other on-screen text: The text and the backgrounds for the captions are created with materials that use the Emission shader instead of the Principled BSDF shader so they won't be affected by the lighting of the scene. A black rectangular plane object that is slightly taller and wider than the text is placed just behind the text for the captions. The "Emergency" message uses the same technique, but with a red material.

TV scanlines: Flat screen TVs shouldn't have these but they look retro so I included them!

The image on the screen is opened in the Image Texture node. The Wave Texture node produces the scanline effects and has 0.0 distortion so the waves are straight lines. The Wave Texture node is plugged into a Color Ramp node with black and white; its output and the output from the Image Texture node are combined in the Mix Shader node.

TV static: I used a similar technique as with applying a scanline effect to a screen, but with a Noise Texture node in place of the Wave Texture node, and the Color Ramp node that the Noise Texture node plugs into includes a shade of gray. The Mix Color node is set to Mix instead of Soft Light and I used a factor around 0.5 in the panel that showed static. The Factor amount in the Mix Color node can be adjusted to show more or less static noise.

Coloring experiments

In this episode I tried a few different things with the coloring and lighting effects when I was editing this episode in Krita. Continuing from the previous episode, the characters in the hotel have some highlights on them in the color of the lighting; this wasn't present in earlier episodes taking place in the hotel.

The second change is that during the finishing touches, I applied a Soft Light color layer to the entirety of a character instead of only on the areas that aren't in shadow. This change has its trade-offs; it's easier and faster to do than the manual process of erasing the coloring that goes into the shadowed areas, but the shadows don't have as much contrast.

I don't apply that coloring layer to the entire panel because the backgrounds that I rendered in Blender were already affected by the lighting.

The third change is that in the panels that showed lighting on the walls in the hotel, I painted around the edges of the lighting to give them a softer, painted look. The wall materials in Blender are cel-shaded like most of the other materials.

The last is that I didn't add watercolor effects to the scene transitions where the background changed color. I like the effect but I might've left it out this time due to time constraints.

Misc. worldbuilding ramblings that I should probably incorporate into the lore page in a section about technological development

I didn't think about this until just after I published the episode but maybe the picture quality of the TV in the hotel isn't meant to be that good. It looks awfully good and sleek for a TV in 1880's 🙃

However I could chalk this up to the hotels having TVs that are far more sleek than what'd usually be available in the new timeline, which would mostly be based on mechanical and early electronic designs. The people from "the future" would be glad to know that TV exists in the 1880's of the new timeline, but the viewing experience would be drastically different and less convenient!

The courtroom arc from ep. 14 to 19 showed crystal balls being used to show something from a distance; the League's elite officers were watching the cosmic courtroom during these episodes on a crystal ball. Perhaps that can still work for devices that usually interact with only 1 at a time, like phones, or that the type of crystal used in that crystal ball can form the screens of TVs in the new timeline.

It's been established before that a lot of the modern technology that exists earlier than it should in the second and third timelines is from reverse engineering, and the people who did that would've used what they knew would work.

For story purposes though, I wouldn't want the newer technology in the new timeline to get *too* convenient for the people who arrived here. I think it could still be one of the challenges for these people to navigate in this new timeline.

Episode 42

29 Jul 2024

This episode adapts pages 105 - 106 of the previous comic version and expands on them with new scenes. As with the previous episode, some dialogue was re-arranged to make it flow more smoothly. It also expands on the dynamics between the Magical Renegades: Renegade Threat Level Red Alert is the type who is eager to fight, but this is the second time already she's been wary of the line from the Magical Renegades' incantation "There's no such thing as too much firepower!"

What to do? She finds herself being the voice of reason compared to Renegade Midnight Conductor, and if that's flattering, that's only a small consolation because of the danger ahead. This probably also gives some clues about the dynamics between Katt and her friends. Not only did Legionnaire Princess withstand the attack Midnight fired at the end of the previous episode, she had enough stamina to left to summon a pair of familiars and boast about it!

This is familiar but not entirely

Princess' familiars that she summoned were completely redesigned from the previous comic version. In the previous version, they were robots with fairy wings and had some similarities to the robots that fought earlier in the battle, but her familiars had longer bodies and had dog ears and they also had butler motifs. The dog and butler motifs were symbolic of loyalty, but for the new version, I had another idea.

I could've kept their designs as they were but redesigned them to be holographic knights which would further Legionnaire Princess' regal image and contrast her with her distant relative Renegade Rouge Royal, whose Magical Renegades uniform will have a knight motif to it and her weapon might be based off of a longsword (one of the largest swords that can be wielded one-handed) to contrast with Legionnaire Princess' which is based on a rapier. That'd logically lead to her supercharged weapon being based off of a two-handed sword such as a zweihander but I also considered that could be her normal weapon too 🤔

My plans were originally to model them in Blender, which could've worked since I already have a basic character model, can attach armor to it, and have made holographic effects before. They can be seen in episode 29 with the screens in the phone booth. I decided to make the familiars with vectors in Inkscape though to save time and it would've been far easier to make panels with them and Princess together in the composition.

I made them one path at a time when I began vectoring them. The base colors could be anything in the early stages and I chose colors that contrasted with each other to help tell paths apart from each other. Once all of the details were added, I was ready to apply the final colors to them. The strokes are magenta with a dotted Stroke Style and the fill is a pink to white gradient.

When applying the same gradient to several paths such as with this character, there are two ways to apply it:

• Selecting all of the objects and using the gradient tool on them. This makes the gradients entirely even across the paths, but may have a slower performance.
• Group all of the selected objects together and use the gradient tool on the group. This is generally faster, but the gradients aren't even on some paths. This is what I used and I needed to manually correct a few paths' gradients to be more even.

I used the second method to apply the gradients this time.

Princess summoned two familiars in the previous version but since they were fighting only two of the Magical Renegades instead of three, the dialogue was different:

Previous version:

Current version:

It's also different since Ainslie is a new character that was added in this rewrite. The fight becomes three against three, but Princess has the advantage.

Other refinements

The second WIP covered that the model I use for the hotel exterior and surroundings had a lot of additions to them. The planters and bench wood have updated materials that are more detailed. The plants usually don't have outlines since the inverted hull line art technique didn't work well with some of the objects. I hope that's not too distracting. However they were a great time-saver since they're modified from free assets. There were other smaller refinements such as widening the sidewalks, moving the lamp posts to the new edges of the sidewalks and adding more abstract shapes to represent masses of trees and bushes in the distance.

The scenes inside the hotel look different than they did in episodes 28-30. It's not that hotels can be remodeled that quickly... unless there's some time manipulation at play, but it looks different because I got more efficient with modeling rooms and had some updated ideas to make the hotel look more luxurious and more *aesthetic*. The 4th WIP post for this episode covered the remodeling process.

I updated the materials in the hotel during the production of this episode because I learned a technique that makes cel-shaded materials adapt their colors to lighting! This is the video I learned it from: Anime Cel Shader in Blender [EEVEE] - Comfee Tutorial and exactly the kind of ongoing channel I was looking for about how to render anime-style scenes and materials!

Of course I only found out about this technique and the channel that video is from after I started modeling the outside area for a night-time scene during episode 40 😭 When I started creating each of the base color materials to the buildings and everything else, I needed to manually adjust each color in the Color Ramp nodes to be darker than the original base color. If I needed to render the same scenes during the day, I'd need to manually adjust each of those colors again to the original base colors.

That wouldn't be an issue since I'd also be updating those materials to be affected by dynamic lighting will be much more efficient moving forward.

The interior of the hotel has mostly pink lighting but it could change, and manually adjusting each color to fit that lighting would be even more difficult and tedious since I'd need to get the color palettes of everything in the scene loaded into a different program and put a pink lighting layer over them and adjust it until it looks right. Then I'd need to use the eye dropper tool for each color to get the Hex codes, then paste them in the color picker for each color in the Color Ramp node for that object in Blender. It'd be so much extra work so the timing was perfect that I found that tutorial!

I manually traced each of those leaves and grass blades in front of her so they'd be in front. It was about as tedious as it sounds since the background and the planter in the foreground were part of the same render 😅 I dreaded this part but when I started I focused on the progress I was making, one clump of grass blades at a time. There was another time I used this technique in the episode, but it was a lot easier.

Some of the panels that took place indoors also used this technique since there were characters standing behind couches, and I needed to trace part of the couch to put the characters behind it, but it was very easy. Using NRP materials made this a lot easier!

The previous cel shading technique

Before I learned a technique to make cel shaded materials that adjust to dynamic lighting, I've been using a basic technique where all of the shadows and highlights were included in the color palette. The colors not adjusting to the lighting isn't an issue when a scene won't have dynamic lighting or the renders will be imported into another program to add the effects.

I prefer to include all of the lighting for a 3D-modeled scene in Blender so that led me to the steps I described above of manually adjusting all of the colors for each material in the night-time outdoors scenes.

However I usually add the lighting effects to characters when I import my webtoon files into Krita for the last steps.

Importing the render is like when I import my webtoon files into Krita for the finishing touches which include the lighting effects on the characters. I used to do all of the lighting effects on characters in the Inkscape files but since the technique required duplicating every object making up a character and each one could be made of many objects, it was complex and CPU-consuming.

What could've been... twice

This was going to adapt pages 105-108, and show more of the fight between Legionnaire Princess and the Renegades but the new scene with Alicia, Melody and Camelia became long enough that it could lead into an ending for the episode. I was only going to briefly show them in a scene of Ella filing the missing person report, but I gave these characters more focus since Ella hasn't appeared in a long time either.

The scene of Ella filing the missing person report isn't in this episode since it was moved to the next one, making this the second time that scenes that were planned for this episode got split off into the next one!

Episode 41

4 May 2024

This episode adapts pages 102 - 104 of the previous comic version. The production on this episode was long because it heavily reworks the events in those pages to help them flow better and to polish the character interactions. Midnight was a hypocrite in the previous version for disliking Princess for already being a mage, but that wasn't executed well. It was also jarring to see her suddenly shoot Princess; Renegade Threat Level Red Alert didn't know why and that was a shock to her too.

Midnight disliking Princess for being two types of mage is hypocritical since she was already a time traveler before she became a Nova-class Mage, Ainslie and Avogadro were already Classical Mages before they became Nova-Class Mages.

It was reasonable to show a character flaw and hypocrisy can be one of them, but I feel like for her to be a hypocrite in this situation would undermine the message that the Magical Renegades intended.

However there's still another character flaw that Midnight showed which was her impulsiveness. In her impulsiveness she fired the rest of her weapon's power at Princess. Even if this successfully stops Princess, Midnight still put herself and her team in a highly risky situation they'd rightfully be worried over. If it doesn't then Midnight's actions made the situation more difficult for herself and her team!

That scene is a large expansion from the previous comic version. In that scene, Midnight realizing that Princess wielded the former Renegade Eminence Danger's former weapon took place over one page. It could've had more of an impact if it took place over multiple pages that showed more of what Midnight was thinking, her expressions and body language as she pointed her weapon at Princess.

I did that in this episode. The montage of Midnight bringing out her weapon and aiming it at Princess was a lot of extra work but I like the choreography of it.

This one will be for the Lore section too!

When Avogadro created the first successful startup device, he wrote about how he intended to level the playing field to give humans a chance at becoming mages without The Magestablishment's rules so he'd see it as ideal to meet humans who share his values but were rejected from the Classical Mage initiation process, but he's also not against non-humans from also becoming Nova-class Mages. If he were, he wouldn't have let them join and he would've also been a hypocrite!

Katt worried about this though in episode 35 since she's a Mage Plus, effectively a magical super soldier. This class of mages were widely seen as living weapons and saw themselves this way too. Even with her losing most or all of her powers, the reputation of the Mage Pluses made her afraid that Avogadro would disqualify her from joining the Magical Renegades.

In the previous version it seemed like Princess had the strengths of both types of mages but I reconsidered that in this new version to keep her and some other characters from getting overpowered and having too much of an advantage over Nova-class Mages that started as regular humans. I think in a magic system, power should always come at a price or there should always be trade-offs.

Establishing this now here and in the Lore section: Classical Mages, Time Travelers, Dimension Weavers, Mage Pluses, ghosts and demons have an internal ability to use magic that they channel in their spells. So do the Magic Gatekeepers but they wield the Superweapons; having an immense amount of magical power is required to wield them, and they boost the wielder's power even further and the wielder needs to keep that power under control. Even without Mia having her superweapon, she's no pushover.

These abilities could interfere with the ability to sync with a Nova-Class Mage weapon that the wielder has to limit how much the use their other abilities while they wield the weapon.

The magical power of the Nova-Class mages comes from the wielders' weapons and their sync with them. Having resolve is a necessary part of being able to sync with the weapon; anything that disrupts the synching can make a Nova-Class mage unable to wield it, and if the weapon runs out of power or gets damaged then it can't be used either. Humans would be able to sync with these weapons more easily but might be completely defenseless if they can't use them.

Some humans are also skilled with enchanted tools, anti-magic tools or using potions which can help even the playing field. The former two would require a lot of skill in melee or ranged combat. Anti-magic tools could be melee weapons or projectiles.

The switch to cel-shaded metals

WIP 3 featured this change.

I used the usual technique to create cel-shaded materials, but the Principled BSDF node has the Metallic setting adjusted, and I moved each of the colors in the Color Ramp node to the very far left, as much as I could while still showing each of the colors. This needed to be adjusted since with my usual lighting setups, only the darker shades of the metal would appear and I wanted those highlights.

This can be tweaked a few ways; in the Color Ramp node I set the gradient to Ease instead of Constant to give the shading a slightly softer look. Constant is usually used in cel-shaded materials because they give only solid blocks of color:

This was meant to be longer

I intended for this episode to adapt pages 102 - 108 of the previous comic version, but it only went up to 104 and ended on a cliffhanger because production up to that point took long enough. Episodes have been averaging around one a month and I wish I could update more often. Since it's already been a month since ep. 40 has been published it seemed to be for the best to wrap up episode 41 with the pages it adapted, and adapt the rest as episode 42.

Callbacks and a new Renegade codename

There are callbacks to two different episodes; when Renegade Threat Level Red Alert tells Midnight and Knockout that she (as Katt) witnessed Imperatrix bragging about her crimes in the courtroom, this is a callback to episode 17.

When Midnight thought it over and figured out that Princess is Chelsea, there's a callback to when they met from episode 7. When she thinks about how Princess looks related to the Mallory Family, there's a panel showing Ainslie. This panel is from episode 25 and the last time she appeared was episode 26 which was close to 2 years ago in real time.

Ainslie was introduced in those episodes as being a member of the Magical Renegades that defected from the Mallory Family's faction. Her alter-ego is mentioned to be Renegade Rouge Royal. Midnight mentioning that Princess looks like "...Renegade Rouge Royal, but far less cool" struck a nerve with Princess, since she, as Chelsea was taught by her family that Ainslie was a traitor and a disgrace and would've been taught to be unlike her.

Monica re-appears after even more episodes; her last appearance in them was in ep. 15 which was 3 years ago in real time. She returns in the League headquarters and is on the other line when Princess was talking on her headset.

Lucy also re-appears after several episodes; the last one she appeared was a cameo in ep. 28. She won't appear much in ATC because her main role is to be the mascot of the Magical Renegades site, but she's still in ATC as a fourth wall-breaking joke character. When I had the idea to throw in a silly pop quiz question at the start of the episode, this was the perfect chance for her to re-appear as a joke character! (The answer to that pop quiz question is E: Ponder something about that officer and think about how she seems familiar somehow)

Remaking an interior design

The first WIP for this episode featured 3D models of Monica's office for when she'd re-appear. Some design elements could be reused for the other League members' offices but each of them would have differences to show their differences in their styles and personalities.

As I was modeling this, I looked back on how the process compared to when I modeled the Magical Renegades HQ interiors for episode 25 and 26. Since then I've become a lot more efficient with modeling and with making the backgrounds easier to blend in with the art style!

Webnovel chapters 19-20

23 Mar 2024

Chapter 19

This more clearly shows how the Magic Gatekeepers don't want to endorse the Magical Renegades for going against what the Magic Gatekeepers enforce, but conceding that the Magical Renegades might be the best hope at overthrowing the League. There's also a conversation between students at the table which shows how they feel about this "challenge":

Ella's line lampshades the "wake up, go to school, save the world" trope that's common in the magical girl genre and how impractical it'd be. However, if someone is a time traveler, they have an advantage with manipulating time! Is it down to the last hour and you still need to finish an assignment? Slow down time! You aren't a time traveler? Hope you have a time traveler friend you can ask a favor.

Renegade Midnight Conductor mentions something similar in episode 35; when I get to adapting it, I could tweak the dialogue for Katt to say she heard something like that before. The context is a bit different since the Magical Renegades need to make sure that anyone who wants to join them will be able to handle the work load which can happen on short notice.

After the Magic Gatekeepers teleported the group out of the courtroom and into a downtown plaza, I added a description of the plaza which is based on the first non-recap panels from episode 27. This is a call forward but when I get to adapting episode 27 I'll need to think about if I'll include the recap.

Chapter 20

There's a new scene at the start of the chapter of Roberta serving cake and tea to the League members before Imperatrix began her explanation of how she created the new timeline.

This may be a scene more to lengthen the chapter since it would've been very short if I just did a 1:1 adaptation, but it shows off more interactions between the League members and demonstrates some of Roberta's abilities.

In the webcomic circle I've been part of on Mastodon, there was a series of questions that were asked about what people consider to be "filler". I fell far behind with those questions but some about filler were the last ones I answered. In them, I said filler updates for webcomics are ones that don't move the story forward and are posted in place of a scheduled update.

I added that filler scenes, episodes and arcs exist to pad out the length of a story, but they could still be interesting if they have character development, build on the setting, the lore or give focus to less focused-on characters.

Because of how long it takes to produce an episode, I can't imagine making filler episodes let alone an entire filler arc! 😬 I intend for every episode to move the story forward in some way, or in any slice-of-life episodes, they still help develop characters and the setting around them.

By my definitions, this new scene would be "filler" since I intended it first to add on to the length of the episode but it still had another purpose and it was fun to write! This is another scene that shows how out of place Chelsea and Claudia still feel as new arrivals to the League, Claudia more so because of how she returned to her home time period but is around unfamiliar technology.

The flashback in this and the next few episodes will have more narration in them as Imperatrix describes her surroundings and the details that she thought were relevant. This is a different approach from the webtoon where a change in the background between panels helped establish that this scene is a flashback in the webtoon so it could focus on the dialogue.

There are breaks between the paragraphs of her narration and the sections of third-person narration as a framing device that are intended to clarify when she's narrating for her group and when the narration is for the reader.

Webnovel chapters 17-18

17 Mar 2024

These chapters adapt episodes 17 and 18, and they expand on several scenes. They show more character interactions and emphasize the tense atmosphere in the courtroom. They were all a lot easier and faster to write than they would've been to draw so this was the most practical opportunity.

Chapter 17

I expanded on the confrontation between Imperatrix and Santana to add some dialogue of the Magic Gatekeepers' reactions for chapter 17. Imperatrix was being *extremely, tremendously petty* when she pointed a charged superweapon at Santana for not planning to tip the delivery driver for his order. In some places giving the proper tip is very important. That's a standard that Imperatrix has, but she shouldn't be threatening the entire fate of space-time over this!

I wrote the dialogue for this episode in 2021 before I noticed the phrase "F**k Around and Find Out" become popular, but I couldn't resist including it in the new dialogue; if Imperatrix kept fucking around with space-time she was going to quickly find out the consequences of causing the SPACECON threat level to escalate again!

As I was writing this I intended to just add extra lines that bridged the gap between the start of the "fight" and the last few panels so the last lines of the chapter would be the same as in the episode. With the direction the new lines were taking, I replaced the last lines and create a new ending.

Some of the reactions from the main group of characters are also shown as they face the possibility of seeing a space-time disaster up close but also potential for drama. In a new scene that focuses on the main group, we see some of their reactions to the conflict and threat to space-time they're witnessing:

Kayla is the type who'd keep a stiff upper lip even in the face of danger. Here that's played for laughs with gallows humor but could also be serious. Ella being a teacher feels a strong sense of responsibility and duty towards her students; this is a serious side that contrasts with her sillier one.

Katt blurting out "If the Gatekeepers aren't going to do their f**king job!" as the line that cut the tension and helped de-escalate the conflict is a call-back to episode 16 when she loudly objected to Legionnaire Imperatrix's boasting. It built on to the idea that Katt could be very blunt and outspoken at times when she's confident, but she can be reckless about it and she may be one for brutal honesty.

Brutal honesty that could either de-escalate the conflict or make it worse. She was fortunate... They all were. But this is also Anathema to Commonsense we're talking about and I swear if I ever make a game adaptation of this series I should invoke the Violation of Commonsense trope at least once in it!

There's an extra set of dialogue after Ragnar threatens to join the "fight" between Santana and Imperatrix since he wanted to fight them both. These lines were to bridge the gaps between that and the end of the episode, but as I kept writing I decided to make all of the dialogue after the fight started be new.

The conflict de-escalated in a different way than in the original webtoon episode:

All of the extra lines in these chapters could've been what was said off-panel, but this updated ending for chapter 17 is not only canon but replaces the one at the end of the episode because I prefer how the adaptation turned out.

The extra dialogue elaborates that the Magic Gatekeepers still have a sensible side to them, and that the main group of characters had a small part in influencing the outcome instead of being *completely* helpless.

Imperatrix doesn't like to back down, but she did because like with the Magic Gatekeepers, she has a vested interest in space-time not being destroyed though her reasons are different than the Magic Gatekeepers'. The new dialogue also made it more clear that Ragnar saw the error of his ways at the end, even when Thutmose broke up the fight that could've happened. In the heat of the moment, he may have needed to be reminded of that. Ragnar is the most chaotic of the Magic Gatekeepers, but all of them have a clear interest in *not destroying space-time or threatening its existence*.

Aiko's line "The power to warp space-time is not a toy!" In the episode is also tweaked in this adaptation to clarify that Imperatrix didn't have the power of a super weapon for very long, but Ragnar has already been a Magic Gatekeeper for centuries!

Of all of the chapters that I've adapted, this one may be the most different from the episode it adapts. The writing in the second half of the episode feels rough in comparison. A lot was left out for practical reasons but it was also a missed opportunity to show more character interactions and convey how tense the atmosphere was in the courtroom from the conflicts.

I prefer the tweaked ending for this chapter more than the one for the original episode that the updated ending in the webnovel adaptation is canon. It overwrites the original ending.

Since this is March and the MARCHintosh challenge is going on and I see it in my timeline, I drafted this chapter in MacWrite! I've done this before with a few other chapters starting with chapter 4. It's a very nice and straightforward writing experience but not always practical since at the end, I'll always need to move the draft over to my modern OS and writing program so I can add the HTML for the images. I like to show that old programs can still be usable today.

Chapter 18

Since Chelsea closed out of the holographic window she was viewing the courtroom with during the confrontation in the previous chapter, I added a new section at the start of chapter 18 to show her returning so the dialogue between her and Imperatrix could continue. The new scene also expands on what Imperatrix was thinking when she got reckless in the previous chapter and also clarifies that she summoned Santana with relative ease because she's a skilled summoner.

Summoning as a style of magic would've been much too OP if inexperienced practitioners could easily and safely summon powerful demons!

This chapter and the episode it adapts explain the SPACECON levels which are based on the DEFCON system. This feels harsher in hindsight than when I originally wrote this episode but it'd be too difficult to replace 😬

There was also an extra line from Mia after Imperatrix explained the SPACECON levels. This felt very in-character for Mia to say and calls back to the previous chapter/episode!:

Despite how annoyed Santana is towards Imperatrix for summoning him and threatening to fight him, he concedes that her strategy is clever, and since it annoys the Magic Gatekeepers, he approves of it too:

When Imperatrix left the courtroom afterwards, I merged this bit of narration "Legionnaire Imperatrix was just there to gloat, and was ready to bid the group at the trial goodbye!" with her lines:

Webnovel chapters 15-16

11 Mar 2024

Both chapters are close adaptations of the episodes they adapt, but they add extra lines of dialogue to expand on one of the scenes.

In episode 15 when Chelsea asks if she can go to the courtroom with Imperatrix, a new gag was added after Imperatrix's answer:

If I see an opportunity add in some gags in a scene with a tone that's not too serious, I'll take it!

The other League members' reactions to Roberta's line before she clarified it for Chelsea also showed more about their characterizations: "Christina burst out laughing, Monica chuckled, Imperatrix nodded with acknowledgement, Claudia looked surprised but chuckled, Lily looked embarrassed but Chelsea looked confused."

Chapter 16 adds extra lines and detail to multiple scenes to elaborate on them. This section elaborates that the group of stranded people were shaken up after Katt's outburst that challenged Imperatrix. They weren't going to know what was going to happen and they were lucky Imperatrix was just there to boast and wants to have a lot of witnesses!

This chapter also adds extra details about the cards that were mentioned. In the webtoon episode, they appeared as part of a montage for the readers, but it wasn't clear if the other characters saw them or if they just appeared as a montage for the readers.

In this adaptation, they are confirmed to be shown to the other characters, and their reactions help show these are mysterious cards that were supposed to be closely guarded.

The scene of the Magic Gatekeepers talking over what to do is also expanded on a bit to highlight the conflicting feelings they have despite all wanting the same thing; to stop the Imperatrix and the League!

Episode 40

23 Feb 2024

This is another large expansion as with the past few episodes since Renegade Knockout Tango is added to these scenes when she wasn't originally in the previous comic version, but there's more! I extensively used 3D modeling for the outdoor scenes, redesigned Legionnaire Princess' outfit for when she appeared and tweaked some dialogue.

To show that a significant amount of time passed since Katt left the hotel in episode 32, I added a new scene that shows Melody, Alicia and Camelia being outside and trying to find her. This also brings focus back to these characters who haven't appeared in several episodes and even up to a year of real world time!

This'd also be consistent with Ella's character; as a teacher she's responsible for her students' whereabouts and off-screen she could've had a hand in trying to form a search party and be prepared to file a missing person report if needed.

Stranded Inn Time, remade

For these outside scenes I remade the exterior of the Stranded Inn Time hotel and modeled one of the buildings and a few trees that were in the background from episode 32:

The second WIP introduced this remake with previews of panels that feature it.

This remake is in a separate file from the one I used for the interior since it's only for the exterior and avoids the issue of having to hide every interior object and ensure they don't appear in the renders. Some of the exterior details were modeled in the first file so I could render the shots that needed to show the windows and the shot of Katt standing in the doorway before she left the building, but I didn't model them very efficiently.

The techniques I used for it:

• The front walls are separate objects from the side walls. This let front walls and windows on them be hidden at once in the viewport when I needed to model objects in the lobby.
• The front walls of the hotel and their windows are part of an object collection, and I made collections for each floor.

These techniques made hiding and un-hiding large sections of the hotel easy. There are so many objects in the interior that grouping them together by area or floor is essential. However through more experience with I realize I could've been more efficient with this. 😩 My first hotel model doesn't need the exterior to be complete, but it looked uneven because I didn't perfectly line up the front and side walls with each other.

I use the Archimesh add-on to create walls but I should’ve kept the front walls of each floor in the same object to ensure they'd be lined up and consistent. The windows along the walls could stay their own object collections, but the walls may not have needed to be part of it. Archimesh also makes it easy to configure each of the walls for a room as a single object and the technique I used was much less efficient.

When I need to hide just part of a complete set of walls for a room, I can just select the part I need to hide with the hide command and un-hide it later.

Refinements for the remodeled exterior and this scene:

• Consistently use the Array modifier for objects that'll be in rows to ensure they're evenly spaced out; I also made the mistake of not doing this previously!
• Model a complete set of walls as one object for each floor
• Adapt the tree assets I already modeled and use modified versions of free assets when I don't need to custom-make assets from scratch
• When I added grass assets in the outdoor scenes, include only as many as I needed for the panels to cut down on the file size though a particle system could've also worked for putting grass all around the hotel

The Array Modifier is such a useful and time-saving modifier, and even more now that I'm adding line art to the objects with a manual process! I used it for the windows on both buildings, the planters along the hotel and for the street lights.

When using the Solidify modifier to create an outline for an object, it's far more efficient to add it then the Array modifier so all of the objects in the array will have the outline applied to them.

The most fun and the most tedium

The most fun parts of modeling the hotel exterior were building onto it with the trees, planters and benches outside. These additions were inspired by fancier hotels and I thought the outside area looked too plain before. It was also satisfying seeing most of the Blender experiments I did a few months ago carry over into this scene, but the most tedious part was manually adjusting all of the colors for cel-shaded materials for this night-time scene since they don't respond to changes in lighting with the technique I'm using.

I wonder if there's any post-processing in Blender that could handle changes in lighting for all materials. Compositing in Blender is something I'm still not familiar with aside from knowing of the Kuwahara node to give renders a painterly effect.

In this episode the colors are a bit different and darker because the characters and objects have a dark blue or dark purple layer over them in Soft Light mode to fit them in with the night scenery. I manually added this in Krita after I started my finishing touches for the episode and it could get tedious because I wanted to apply this color layer to objects in the background, but not the skies in them and many of the backgrounds were 3D rendered.

Melody's, Alicia's and Camelia's re-appearances

I was excited for them to re-appear with new outfits! Melody's and Alicia's follow the general pattern of being based off of late 19th century fashions with steampunk elements, but less restrictive in that wearing short sleeves or wearing skirts as high as knee-length are socially acceptable. In real life there were attempts at dress reforms in the late 19th century to make women's fashions far more practical.

Melody's outfit is in browns, greens and purples though she also wears her orange hat. This reflects her skills with gathering or growing herbs and making potions from them.

The panels with her show that she's using an old school Motorola RAZR as her phone, like Kayla has. I thought over whether that'd be more fitting for Melody or whether she might find a smartphone to be more useful because there are apps for nearly everything, and that includes apps for identifying plants. Between the two, the retro option won out 😆

Alicia's outfit is based on moth fashion goth fashion with moth design elements to it, because butterflies are cool but moths are underrated. For a long time I didn't know that they came in a lot of different patterns and colors 😭

Camelia's outfit is based on the color scheme of her usual outfit and also based on 1920's fashion but the long jackets that were fashionable at the time give her a detective look, which is very fitting for this scene.

Legionnaire Princess' redesign

Her outfit and hairstyle were redesigned to remain fancy but be easier to consistently draw. She had a large hat with a daffodil emblem on it which showed her ties to the Mallory Family (spoiler: She's Chelsea), which have a daffodil and belladonna as their emblems.

My first choice was for her to wear a tiara but that would’ve been too much of a pain to draw at different angles, but I also removed the hat with the daffodil emblem on it from her redesign because I thought it was too unwieldy and so she doesn’t make it immediately obvious that she’s Chelsea. However, two of the Renegades she's confronting might still recognize her, or crossed paths with her without knowing it...

I replaced her hat with a steampunk tiara because it's fitting for her being a princess and looks cool! It might still be a pain to adjust at different angles but the design is so fitting for her.

Her dress looks more militaristic which is a design element that the League officers mage outfits will have along with their pink/mauve, gold, white and purple color schemes. Her updated outfit still follows the same general rules as the other League members' mage outfits: Predominantly pink or mauve with gold and purple, has the League insignia on a brooch.

Their mage outfits have some steampunk elements but not as much as the Magical Renegades, and they lean towards more rococo-style fashion which is similar to yet contrasts with the Mallory Family's baroque fashions.

Technical Issues - Save your files!

As mentioned in the 4th WIP for this episode, I had to remake several panels from the previous comic version because I didn't have the .SVG files for the original page on my daily driver 😩

This goes for everyone to frequently save and have backups. When you get a new computer during the production of your work, make sure every file is copied over to the new one.

Dialogue changes

The dialogue was also tweaked in this episode to include extra snark!

Princess' remarks about how Red Alert will also get arrested after her first battle are directed more at her than Midnight.

In the previous version, Red Alert got thrown off by Princess' remarks:

Since Red Alert appears more confident in the new version, Midnight interjecting isn’t so needed anymore, but one of Red Alert's remarks in this scene is inspired by something Midnight told her earlier:

Episode 39

3 Jan 2024

One more episode completed for 2023 and there's a lot to write about with this one! It's an adaptation of pages 98 and 99 of the previous comic version with a large expansion. This episode has a new scene at the start with several new panels!

This new scene is a montage that slows down the the pace compared to the comic version but slowing it down gave me more room to write out characters’ thoughts and expand on their interactions. In some ways the previous version was too fast, and too slow in others.

I didn't show many character interactions in the previous comic version because of the page size limits and set chapter lengths. There are comics with page formats that can cover a lot of plot and about the characters within a limited page size and chapter length, but this just wasn't one of them. 😔 I was trying to be pragmatic with what I showed, but something felt missing when I didn’t focus much on the characters’ interactions beyond the major plot points.

Characterization notes

So far, Renegade Threat Level Red Alert tries to be confident. She’s definitely eager to fight for the Magical Renegades and live up to their principles, but that she was already a Mage Plus and wasn’t a regular human makes her worry about whether she’s worthy of being a Magical Renegade.

The less confident side to her adds some character depth; as a civilian she and her main group of friends are into acting and trying to get a career as an acting and performing troupe. Her role in their troupe is as the main stunt performer, which is a thrilling role, but she's wanted more. The battles she experienced as a Magical Renegade go beyond this in thrill and danger!

When Avogadro wrote of his experiments that created the initiation devices, he intended for the devices to be for people who had the values he was looking for, but likely would’ve been rejected from being initiated as Classical Mages.

Red Alert, as a Mage Plus is something else. As a magical super soldier, her being initiated may go against the spirit of what he intended... Or would that? The Mage Plus project got discontinued and she lost most of her powers so would she have been the type that Avogadro would’ve thought didn’t need to become a Magical Renegade?

Whether Renegade Midnight Conductor knows this or not, she and Avogadro have some disagreements and is confident enough in Red Alert's ingenuity to try to vouch for her if Avogadro won't approve. That'd still be risky though since Red Alert fought in only one battle so far...

Renegade Knockout Tango is a new addition to the past several episodes so each of these episodes will also be expansions to include her. She also works as an instructor due to her centuries of experience but she can still keep a silly side in this role inspired by her performance style as a civilian.

3D modeling

Modeling the flying platform that the Renegades have been on has definitely paid off; in this episode there were several renders made showing it at different camera angles. Creating new models takes more time upfront but pays off when they can be posed or rendered at different angles.

I created many renders for this episode but some of them were only for reference. I've been using this technique throughout the past several episodes: In the panels that have a 3D-modeled background, I made another render that was identical but had character reference models in them that were used as a reference for the perspective and scale.

The background and reference were imported into Inkscape and scaled to the same sizes. It's more practical to compress the renders in another program before importing them though to keep the file sizes down 😅 I placed the references with the character models over the render that was just the background, drew the character over the reference and deleted the reference.

Missed opportunity

This is a missed opportunity I only thought about just before the episode was finished and going back could've interfered with completing this episode before the end of 2023; the platform could've had grit and scrapes to it because of how it got hit with a blast in episode 37 😩

That would've been easy to do since I learned how to make procedural metal materials that have scrapes and bumps in them, but it would've been tedious with needing to re-do every render.

The floor took a direct hit in episode 37, but I didn't know how to show that any part of it took damage since the tiles are also a procedural material.

The hiatus

Magical Renegades ended up on hiatus for 3 months; episode 38 was published in September. I focused on art challenges throughout October and November, and into part of December. The art challenges were fun, but I think I shouldn't do them two months in a row to keep the update schedule from getting *too* slow. Once a month is what I've been able to keep up at most and I'd rather it not slip any further.

When I resumed working on this episode, I hoped to complete it before the end of the year, but there were still other difficulties. I wasn't feeling well for much of December and there were many times I needed to rest and could spend much of a day sleeping. I'd much rather be working on things every day, but around this time of the year, days of exhaustion that I tried to power through caught up with me.

When I had the time and was feeling well enough, I focused on this episode and made a bit of progress most days.

Moving forward in 2024

Progress for episode 40 started before the new year, but the progress on it has been steady. This episode and the next few adapt pages from the previous comic version, but will expand on them with new scenes and tweak the dialogue.

Webnovel chapters 13, 13.5 and 14

5 Nov 2023

Updates for the Anathema to Commonsense webnovel adaptation continue!

In the webtoon version, episode 12 ended with a gag when Fiorina asked if the arguments could keep going because they were the most fun she saw in a courtroom procedure, and episode 13 immediately started with a montage and Camelia's explanation about how her group arrived in the past. This worked for the webtoon format that the resolution to the Magic Gatekeepers' arguments happened off-screen and could be left to the readers' imaginations because extra dialogue often involves extra panels. Some things can be left off-panel and left to the imagination for pragmatic reasons.

I added an extra scene between them so the scene at the start of chapter 13 is new. The montage that Camelia shows the Magic Gatekeepers is also expanded on to mention there was something unusual in the sky during the bus trip but that no one was sure what it was.

This chapter, 11 and 12 justified some of the splash panels and montages that are meant for readers are also in-universe uses of Camelia's and the Magic Gatekeepers' powers. As with several of the chapters so far, this adaptation has more snarky narration!

Chapter 13.5 was a short chapter adapting a short episode. It was tempting though to have Fiorina continue arguing about why couldn't the Magic Gatekeepers just stop the rogue time traveler non-lethally! She would've argued it's better to just get results than to worry about whether there'd be a story for the studio audience to follow, but only if she had that power over the fourth wall!

Legionnaire Imperatrix's dialogue with Chelsea and Claudia was tweaked in chapter 14 to fit in better with chapter 7 of Extra! Chronicles which shows Chelsea and Claudia arriving at the palace when Monica met them and introduced them to Imperatrix. That chapter filled in some gaps of what happened with their arrival at the palace.

Some other lines were refined a bit to help expand on what the characters are feeling. This is a difference that comes from more writing experience; episode 14 was published about 2 and a half years prior!

When Claudia said "I'll do my best to stand on my own, and as part of the League!" In the webtoon, mentioning the League by name might be a continuity error I just noticed. The League hadn't been mentioned by name yet in the episode or in chapter 7 of Extra! Chronicles. It could've been mentioned to her immediately after what the chapter covered, but it's more consistent for Claudia to say "...And as part of this faction" instead of "...And as part of the League".

Episode 14 was also before "magical devices" were officially called Initiation Devices or Startup Devices.

Episode 38

24 Sep 2023

The episode adapts pages 94 - 97 of the previous comic version. Adapting these pages was straightforward but there are extra panels with more glitchy effects and tweaks to the pacing.

The dialogue was slightly changed in the final version. ^^; Renegade Threat Level Red Alert had a lot to think about when she was troubleshooting why she couldn't immediately have the connection she needed to wield her weapon, but she's also having to dodge the blasts from the enemies flying above!

It wouldn't be realistic for those enemies to stop firing while she monologued, so this panel was added to show her dodging, and her thoughts being interrupted. It could've also been funny to point out too, if the enemies actually stopped and gave her the time to monologue. Instead I added a scene of Knockout using her weapon to ward off the enemies to buy some time.

Only the last panel of page 95 was kept because the other panels weren't needed. Page 95 had a similar gag of Red Alert being annoyed that the enemies weren't giving her enough time to charge her attack like in this episode. The gag was down in a way that's more in-character in this episode.

The panel that showed the superconductor crystals is the same one from episode 10 but with some sparkles painted in. Those were rendered in Infini-D 3.0 and I thought over whether to remake that panel in Blender. Due to time constraints I didn't, but the crystal on the first few panels of the episode was redone in Blender (rendered in Cycles) so it was a bit more consistent.

It would've been more jarring to see the same item depicted three different ways in the same episode when there wasn't an intentional art shift each time; the title panel shows it rendered in Blender with its higher level of detail. The first few panels showed it as a vector with a lower level of detail that's clearly 2D, and the panel with the falling crystals is rendered in Infini-D.

That render is ray-traced like the Blender one, but there were probably bound to be differences in the detail because how much ray-tracing has advanced over the past 25+ years. However, when I began using Infini-D, I didn't have a manual and nearly everything I learned was through trial and error, including how to compose surfaces and make them with translucency, with sparkles or reflections!

I replaced the 2D renditions with a render from Blender, but scaled down and with line art traced over them. It may look jarring right next to 2D characters, but that's intentional. These magic superconductor crystals are meant to be otherworldly.

This would've been the second WIP post for the episode

When I was drafting this, the production of episode 38 was almost finished but I also had a deadline I was trying to meet with posting it. Since the finishing touches can still take hours to paint in, I needed to focus on that instead of this post. Since I published the episode first, I reworked this draft into the production notes.

This is a WIP posted on Mastodon on Wednesday:

Renegade Threat Level Red Alert couldn’t get her weapon to work in the middle of a fight, so she’s troubleshooting by seeing if its power source can be used directly! As of writing this, I added watercolor effects to the background.

Another WIP to show off more coloring effects:

Since I only needed the effects to affect her, I created a new layer above the episode. I export the episodes from Inkscape in sections to keep the export times and file sizes manageable. In Krita I put them together then add the extra lighting, color, painting and magic effects.

This panel shows off some of the coloring effects; in a layer above I painted over with a light blue color, alpha-locked the layer afterwards to keep the paint from spilling outside what I already painted then drew red squiggles in & used brushes that help paint in glitchy effects!

Usually I set these color effect layers to Overlay, but Soft Light also works well at other times.

Some more worldbuilding?

This episode also got me thinking more about magic and technology are combined in the universe of Magical Renegades.

It shows that the Magical Renegades members' goggles on their mage outfits, which are a staple of steampunk fashion have a practical use! I like the idea that they could have some functions built in like the ability to detect enemies, but they look like regular steampunk goggles. I was trying to think over if they’d work from a combo of magic and technology like the steampunk-style magic weaponry.

With the level of tech in the new timeline, I think there wouldn’t be as much miniaturization as we have. Engineers such as Christina and Avogadro could reverse engineer some of the modern technology that was brought to the 1880's, but they probably wouldn't have been able to miniaturize it.

The methods may not be available to them because vast budgets for R & D departments went into companies making the smaller cameras, screens and recording devices that we have today.

Stylistically, steampunk and the miniaturization of modern technology don’t really go hand in hand either; if you look at Victorian-era technology, it’s far bulkier than what we have now! If you look at the furniture, a lot of it is ornate. The frames are thicker so there’s more room for decoration.

(Although I like the simpler geometric style of Art Deco, and of 1950's-1970's Space Age-style, I also think it's a shame that ornate styles of furniture and architecture fell out of popularity)

So all of this rambling is to say that the goggles worn by the Magical Renegades in their mage outfits are probably fitted with technology, but also with magic to make them a lot more compact than they probably should be. ^^;

Defining the limits of magic and technology is important in a setting that features both of them, but the line between them can sometimes be blurry. The Classical Mages take pride in their styles that are based on spell casting rituals and natural ingredients that can be used in magic. They still use wands or staves that are made from different materials including metals, but it's through smelting, one of the earliest-discovered technologies that let them shape metal and cast out its impurities to make their wands or staves.

With that in mind, this means not even the royals are above using... technology with their magic!

So where is the dividing line between the Classical Mages and the Nova-Class Mages, and why the Magestablishment usually saw the latter as a threat? The Nova-Class Mages take the use of technology a lot further than the Classical Mages do. That use of technology allowed the creation of the initiation devices which also contain a lot of magical power over their own that the wielder isn't required to have any magical ability of their own.

That idea of people without magic, who didn't go through the bureaucracy of the Magestablishment to become Classical Mages is what's seen as dangerous to many of the most powerful Classical Mages. Some who are genuinely concerned about the safety of this "mysterious technology" that bypasses the Magestaglishment's rules, but others want to restrict the use of magic and concentrate it among themselves and their peers.

The Nova-Class Mages, particularly the Magical Renegades see it as liberation, empowering people who may not have otherwise gotten a chance to become mages, and this could be the major source of conflict between them and some of the Classical Mages.

Webnovel chapters 11 and 12

11 Sep 2023

Most of the past chapters were straightforward to adapt, but episode 11 was tricky to adapt into a chapter. That's the episode that introduced the Magic Gatekeepers, and it was tricky to adapt for introducing four characters and describing their appearances and the appearances of their weapons all at once!

In the webtoon, the splash panels that showed each of them with their superweapons may have just been flashy splash panels for the viewers, but in this adaptation they were kept in by explaining that they're astral projections that the Magic Gatekeepers made and showed to the group on trial!

Autocorrect is usually useful but it gets in the way of some of Ragnar's dialogue which is supposed to be in Middle English.

Chapter 12 was much more straightforward after the challenges of adapting episode 11, but there were still a few tweaks to the writing. There's an extra line of dialogue in this chapter after the group at the defendant's table cheer on Camelia; she says they're in it together because they are! Mia's objection was slightly re-worded to clarify it's Camelia's snarky statements she objects to!

The Magic Gatekeepers find it admirable that Camelia continued to defend her team even after she was ruled out as a suspect. They're feared by many in-universe, but they have standards! They would've thought lowly of her if she decided that the rest of her group were on their own!

Episode 37

19 Aug 2023

This episode adapts pages 91-93 of the previous comic version, and it was mostly a straightforward adaptation with a few extra panels and scenes since Renegade Knockout Tango wasn't in the previous version. Some dialogue also needed to be changed to fit dialogue and continuity from previous episodes.

Several of the panels that are revamped from these pages were expanded on; characters' legs or more of their outfits were drawn when they previously weren't in view because they were confined to comic page panels with clear cut-offs. The revamped panels fit the entire width of the webtoon episode, and their cut-offs and the transitions to the next scene come from the use of gradients that cover the bottom of that panel and lead into the top of the next one.

Because of this more gradual transition I needed to draw more of a panel than I needed to before. In a lot of webtoons, full-body panels that take the width of the episode are frequent which gives those scenes more of a cinematic feel when the reader slowly scrolls down, but it can be a lot of extra drawing, and that was a trade-off I took.

This revamped panel of Red Alert challenging the enemies was one of those panels; her lower body and more of her hair needed to be drawn when they didn't need to in the previous version. That panel is another to combine 2D and 3D since Vega was redrawn with a 3D model reference.

Work on these episodes will always be a balance between trying to be efficient while conveying that cinematic feel. When 3D modeling for this series, there are challenges to efficiently blending the backgrounds in with the art style.

In my production notes for chapters 3-5 of the webnovel adaptation, that covered the exception I have to blending in 3D backgrounds.

The techniques I used when I began extensively using 3D backgrounds since episode 25 weren't very efficient but I was still looking for tips or figuring out more about Blender that would make my process more efficient. A major step forward with this episode is that it's the first to incorporate lineart to objects in the viewport and render. Being able to see them in the viewport removes the trial and error of waiting for a render to be finished before I could see if the lineart turned out the way I wanted.

Freestyle didn't work out well for me by the time I was working on episode 27 or 28 because the renders would sometimes have extra lines on objects that were difficult to edit out; curtains in the hotel rooms (seen in episode 28) are holographic and glittery; editing out the extra lines would've been very difficult. I remember trying that before I gave up and re-did the render without Freestyle and manually drew in the lineart. That being said, I've seen others use Freestyle to great effect with stylized renders and I'd like to know how to.

The process I've been using since this episode is simple and usually works for what I need. I also switched to using the Eevee render engine since that lineart technique I wrote about for the first WIP doesn't seem to work in Cycles, and Eevee works well enough for most props and backgrounds.

I wasted several minutes rendering some the cloud backgrounds that just had clouds and stars in Cycles because I thought I needed to render all of them in Cycles! Those backgrounds could've been rendered just as well in Eevee and I switched when I realized that! The only backgrounds I needed Cycles for were the ones with effects that needed it, such as the holographic screens episodes 29 and 35, and the glowing bubble effects in episode 35 and 36.

Knowing which of these render engines to use will help save time.

Dialogue changes

The dialogue in page 92 of the previous comic version when Renegade Midnight Conductor was about to fight back when she realized her weapon was almost out of power almost needed to be significantly changed.

Previous version:

Renegade Threat Level Red Alert's expression and line needed to be changed. In the previous version, she was shocked and annoyed because this was when Midnight first mentioned that her weapon was almost out of power. Her expression and dialogue were changed to her being worried but not surprised since she heard Midnight mention her weapon was almost out of power before she got the extra power she needed for Temporal Standstill, and suspected it shouldn't be used for long.

She already knew that the Nova-class mage weapons run on a power meter, but her annoyance over that still holds up though!

This scene from page 93 of the previous version was removed:

I usually like to keep gags, but this one didn't fit here. It was meant to make sense by showing that Nova-class mages are supposed to have some connection with their magic weapon that lets them begin to use it without training which is why Midnight was shocked that Red Alert wasn't able to immediately use hers.

Something wasn't right when she didn't have that connection; this still holds up, but this scene just seemed out of place for the atmosphere of the rest of the scene.

On another note, I removed the Behind the Scenes part of the title for these updates moving forward for the Neocities version because they aren't needed here since everything on this page is behind the scenes. That title is a holdover from these posts on Record Compendium to distinguish them from the new episodes and lore updates.

Webnovel chapters 3-5

31 Jul 2023

These chapters are straightforward adaptation of episodes 3-5, but for chapters 3 and 5 it was also tricky to narrow down which panels to include for them. Too many for a chapter's length would make the page look cluttered, but including the start of the supercharge sequence from episode 3 and the time rift scene from episode 5 were too cool to pass up!

Episode 3 was the first I wanted to go all-in with the effects!

Starting with episode 4, I used a different process of cropping the images. For episodes 1-3, I found the .SVG files I used in Inkscape and exported individual panels, but I couldn't do this for episode 4 since it turned out that I didn't save all of them I made for the webtoon to my newer computer.

The first few episodes were made on the computer that was my previous daily driver and I thought I transferred all of the .SVG files to the newer one but I missed several of them. I didn't use any services that made transferring easy so I just transferred what I could manually! ;__; Transferring them would be difficult since my previous daily driver isn't so reliable I needed to use the completed webtoon file that I had for episode 4, which is a .JPG and has some compression.

Several of the panels I wanted to use had parts of speech bubbles in them, and I manually painted them out but it wasn't as tedious as I dreaded it'd be:

• I opened the file in Krita, selected panels, copied and pasted them into new files.
• When I started to paint over them I started by creating a new layer above the panel and drawing the outlines of the objects that were obscured by the speech bubbles.
• In a layer between that one and the panel, I created a new layer and painted within the outlines of the above layer, matching the color of the surroundings to paint back in what the speech bubbles covered.

The close-up panel of Aurora in chapter 4.5 was the trickiest and probably not seamless though because I needed to replicate the brush stroke effects in the background for the parts of the background that were covered by the speech bubbles!

Chapter 5 is a short chapter since there's not much dialogue and the episode it adapts is also short but this chapter features a lot of images for its length. I included the parts of the scene in the time portal because I really liked how those images turned out.

The 3D parts of the background were made in Infini-D 3.0. I was more proficient with making surfaces or textures in Infini-D than with Blender back then, but I really like the look of vintage ray-traced CGI and using a program for the 90's was perfect for that!

I'm proficient enough now at Blender I could recreate those backgrounds but it might be tricky adjusting the settings to match the capabilities of 90's-era programs to keep the renders from looking too polished for the era.

CGI in 90's video games made heavy use of image textures and they often had to be at a low resolution to fit within hardware limits, but knowing this is a clue in how to make 90's-style CGI in Blender!

Webnovel chapters 1 and 2

25 Jul 2023

Creating the webnovel adaptation was a lot of extra work, but this has been a better result than the short-lived attempt to mirror the episodes on the site. The most efficient ways to host comic pages or webtoon episodes on a site require JavaScript, which I haven't learned. There would've been the cost in time of trying to learn enough just for this purpose, but the much larger file sizes of the images would also run into the free storage limit more quickly.

Splitting the episodes up and putting them back together is more efficient than just uploading a whole episode. I tried this with just HTML and CSS, but the results weren't seamless even when I tried to make sure there were no spaces between the images. So I gave up on this for several months and just had to deal with my frustration not being able to easily mirror the main story.

To resolve this I drafted the webnovel and had a clear idea for how!

I opened the file for episode 1 of the Anathema to Commonsense webtoon and had another program window open to start typing away! Adapting the first episode was pretty straightforward and set how I’d adapt the other episodes, but adapting episode 2 was a challenge.

Already when writing it, I added several extra lines to fill in some of the scene transitions it felt more natural to write out some of the characters’ reactions or what they might say or do before the transition to the next scene.

Challenges adapting episode 2

With episode 2 in particular, a lot of dialogue such as when Christina met Susana was left off-panel, and it was just mentioned in the narration that they introduced themselves and Susana met the other Magical Renegades members.

It would’ve taken way too long then to draw out those interactions although I wanted to.

At the time when I was planning out this episode in early 2020, I was still focused on keeping the episodes concise although they were still going to expand on a lot that was left off-panel in the previous comic version.

Some scenes were more drawn out since I had a lot more room per episode to expand on scenes, but I still needed to be pragmatic with what I included.

When I was writing episode 2, I didn’t have much of a solid idea for what the interior of the Magical Renegades HQ looked like since that wasn’t relevant then. I began designing it during the production of episode 25 since there were going to be scenes that took place inside the headquarters.

However, there were differences between the timelines. Episode 2 and chapter 2 take place around where the second timeline starts to diverge while episode 25 takes place in the third timeline which is a bit more technologically advanced than the second in the same timeframe.

Anything about the other Magical Renegades members wasn’t mentioned at all in episode 2. This was to introduce them later, but since I have more of a description for the interior design of the headquarters and one of the members is a designer with a style that stood out a lot for the time period, mentioning this became relevant!

It also added on to some more character relations, that Susana might’ve seen that member’s artwork at an art fair before.

A slight retcon

Originally in chapter 3 of Extra! Chronicles, which also covered this event, the interior of the headquarters were more plain: “The lobby of the building was a large room with gray walls, and tiled floor. The walls weren't entirely plain; they were decorated and illuminated by different colors of neon lights. Susana curiously glanced at them, but didn't have enough time to ask whether they were magic, or a technology she'd never seen.”

This was retconned so the 80’s arcade-style floor was already installed and the arcade cabinets in the headquarters (shown in episode 25) were in the process of being built.

Another frustration

While I was nearly finished with the draft for chapter 2, I realized that I did a lot of double work because chapter 3 of Extra! Chronicles covered this same scene!

The major differences were that chapter 2 of the Anathema to Commonsense adaptation added a conversation between Susana and Christina and chapter 3 of Extra! Chronicles added Avogadro instead.

Most of that chapter was merged into chapter 2 of the ATC adaptation. To avoid it from being redundant, the EC chapter will be rewritten to focus solely on Susana’s initiation process or could be chalked up to some of Paige's research not being completely accurate!

In-universe with Extra! Chronicles, Paige is the writer and narrator of each chapter so she’d be frustrated over doing a lot of redundant work!

The lesson with that is I needed to look through those Extra! Chronicles chapters again because some of them were stories that were completely off-panel, but scenes from the webtoon are featured in some of them. Chapter 3 of it happened to extensively feature them!

Episode 36

7 Jul 2023

This episode adapted pages 86-90 of the previous comic version, and it was mostly a straightforward adaptation! The backgrounds in the panels were ported from the previous version which was made in Inkscape but the "body" of the webtoon featured magic cloud and bubble backgrounds that I rendered in Blender.

This was the most practical blending of 2D and 3D; I haven't gotten to trying to render moving clouds or streams of magical energy before except when I finished modeling Shooting Star Vega from last year:

During the production of episode 34, I tried to remake the rainbow clouds in 3D but couldn't figure out a way that worked; importing the clouds as SVGs into Blender didn't let me modify them as much as I hoped to, and I also tried creating metaballs (which I kept reading as meatballs and autocorrect does too) (Created with New Object >> Metaball) with a cloud material added to them; metaballs are good for modeling some items like clouds or snowballs; they can stick together but can also be moved around and separated without affecting the meshes of any of them.

However, there was something else I remade for this episode!

Shooting star remake

When I was modeling Vega for this piece was the first time I modeled a smoke trail for a shooting star that was supposed to be in the background. It didn't make it into the final picture, but was reused for the series banner on Tapas:

The trail turned out decently but it was difficult to make. I didn't remember how I got that result, so I tried another technique to make the trail, which I created as a plane that I stretched out to be long and narrow then used proportional editing to shrink the tail end of the trail and move it upwards so shape the trail into an arc. Then I extruded it to give it thickness, and used the Displace modifier to alter the shape and make it irregular.

The texture used in the displacement is a cloud texture that is soft and scaled up.

Another extra drawing incorporated into the webtoon! (And the extra story that almost got incorporated)

This was the panel that showed Renegade Threat Level Red Alert when her initiation was finished:

I would've just revamped the this panel to update the art and her outfit, but her pose was also changed to match it from this drawing from Huevember 2020. I considered adding the story with it into this episode, but decided to save that for later when Renegade Midnight will mention Renegade Threat Level Red Alert to Avogadro.

The Scattered Archives stories in the third timeline happen around or during the events covered in Anathema to Commonsense, and some of the stories cover events that were meant to be included later on!

Episode 35

1 Jun 2023

This episode adapts the end of page 81 through the start of page 86 of the previous comic version. It was overall more straightforward than the previous few episodes, but there were still significant changes.

This episode establishes in this version that Katt is one of the Mage Pluses, the class of magical super soldiers that were eventually decommissioned after some "incident". In this version they were first mentioned when Monica was introduced.

While I was writing this new version, I was undecided whether Katt would've kept being a Mage Plus secret from everyone she knew and whether she was under orders by the government to do so because the Mage Pluses still have some of their power left even when supposedly being decommissioned. There was a lot of time to make a final decision because it took many episodes for this to even be mentioned, and it was going to be many episodes before there's any focus on the school setting again!

Katt is one of the magical super soldiers that's trying to live a relatively normal life by going to school and learning practical skills that she missed out on. Whether the Mage Pluses were created that way or were once humans or mages that became Mage Pluses, they missed out learning some basic skills to become more efficient fighters. This didn't seem to be a problem when their faction was active, but when it disbanded, it posed challenges for them!

This gives me some ideas for some slice of life spin-off stories and scenes that could make their way into Extra! Chronicles.

It's not much, but Katt's ability to leap really high which was shown in episode 5 is one of those holdovers of her powers, and she survived stunt accidents that the average human might not!

However, once the decision was made, I knew I'd need to stick with it! I thought about what would be more appealing; I gravitated more towards the idea that Capital Remedial would even allow these super soldiers to enroll to help teach them skills associated with civilian life, and this can be played in silly or serious ways. Katt's idea of being a civilian though is to be a stunt performer!

The initiation process and some more lore

Just before the initiation process began, Renegade Midnight Conductor gave an explanation about the Classical and Nova-class mages. These panels were kept in this episode from the previous version, but the dialogue was changed.

Midnight Conductor also mentions that being a mage isn't practical for everyone and that being one can cut into the mage's social life, career or sleep schedule. I wanted to get a bit into the ramifications of the "wake up, go to school, save the world" trope that's common in a lot of magical girl series; the main characters in Magical Renegades are adults and some are still in school, but when they're not, they might have jobs instead.

I've pondered if someone with no social life and no responsibilities could be an ideal candidate for the Renegades, having nothing to conflict with their duties! Realistically, this is something Katt will have to worry about; she's still in school and with a group of friends who are attempting a career as performers!

There isn't such a character (yet?) with either the Renegades or the League, though Chelsea comes the closest to being one. If she dropped out of school (which she'd like to do), would she count as being idle rich when she still has duties related to the League and would also to her family since she officially became royalty? She's the ambassador between the League and the royal family because of her ties to the latter, but at least those are duties she wants.

Time travelers of a high enough rank can manipulate time and Midnight Conductor is of a high enough rank that she can to help her teammates, but this can't always be relied on. Humans and mages are supposed to co-exist, with the mages being dedicated to keeping malevolent ghosts and demons (and malicious mages) away from humans so humans can safely do what they need or want.

As Renegade Midnight Conductor said, being a mage isn't for everyone because it wouldn't be practical for everyone. When she looks for candidates to join the Magical Renegades, she also considers whether a candidate would be able to and want to put in the time to train and put up with the more tedious parts. Being a Magical Renegade isn't just about flashy costumes and magic!

Although the royal families are classical mages, even the worst royals know their societies will collapse without humans focusing on the fields that mages usually aren't able to dedicate as much time.

The incantations for the initiation are mostly kept from the previous version but with some tweaks. The verses are full of boasts, but one of the additions in the middle is a somber element: "In our hands are these wondrous devices... / Remember earlier wielders’ risks and sacrifices..."; this alludes to the Renegades' fight against the royal family's military in 1879 that cost Ainslie her life.

This new verse "From these rise ourselves, magic weapons wielding! / Keep the meter up and our power shall be unyielding!" are up-front about another trade-off of being a Nova-class mage; the weapon needs to be maintained and its power meter needs to be managed! If it runs out in the middle of a fight or the weapon gets too damaged, and the wielder doesn't have any other powers of their own, they'll be powerless!

The Magical Renegades are upfront about this because of the history of unscrupulous mages who sold phony cures and medicines to humans to bilk money out of them.

Another blending of 2D and 3D

The last panel of the episode uses the Import Images as Planes tool to combine 2D and 3D:

The flames, character silhouettes and explosion were scaled up in Inkscape, separately exported as .PNG files and imported into Blender. At this angle in the viewport, you can see how each of them were placed to give a layering effect. The light at the front of the platform is moved away from the platform because it interfered with the camera angles in some of the other renders, but it'll be moved back for any front view shots of the platform that are further away.

The explosion isn't in front of the platform because I'll make it curve around the front to make it more dynamic. Images as planes can be scaled, subdivided or moved around like any other plane!

I used the Loop Cut and Slide tool and chose an odd number of cuts so I can select one right in the middle. With Proportional Editing on, I selected the cut in the middle and moved it forwards along the X-axis. The larger the number of cuts, the smoother the proportional editing will be. I also moved the leftmost and rightmost edges back along the X-axis so the plane is more curved.

This presented a problem though. At this angle and the emission strength the image plane with the magical explosion effect had, the image plane with the character silhouettes couldn't be seen in the camera view anymore. Lowering the emission strength made the silhouettes more visible but also made the magical explosion not as bright as I wanted it to be.

I moved the character silhouettes closer to the camera and shrunk them down slightly, went to the Shading node to reduce the Alpha value to around 0.6. This kept them partially visible and gave the illusion that the explosion was closer to the camera as intended!

What worked and what didn't

In my production notes for the previous episode I said I'd try a different technique for the lighting effects that'd be more efficient than manually painting all of them in. I was going to make clipping masks for each panel in Inkscape by duplicating each character in each panel, moving the duplicates aside, and using boolean operations on each of them to remove the shaded areas.

These would leave just the parts that weren't shaded. They'd be exported into Krita, placed over the panels they correspond to, and would be alpha-locked so I could color in the shading only in those areas.

However, because of the amount of detail in my art style, this process took so long with just the first panel of the episode that I realized I wasn't going to be saving time. It could've even taken longer than the manual painting technique I've been using before so I went back to that!

Episode 34

15 Mar 2023

This episode adapts pages 79 - 81 of the previous comic version. There are extensive changes to the dialogue and many new panels due to retcons and the addition of Renegade Knockout Tango to the scene.

In this episode, Renegade Midnight Conductor clarifies that the initiation device reacted unusually to Katt and that shouldn't have happened to anyone. Before Midnight clarified this, Katt asked if the device detected if she was an unworthy wielder until she either broke the mechanism or proved her worth. Midnight Conductor's explanations reveal that the initiation devices also need to be kept out of the hands of the Minions of Nemesis since they could try to brute force the security mechanism.

I designed that part to look like a security infographic! XD

Shown in the graphic: A unauthorized user who still has the credentials (i.e: ability to initiate a wielder), and an unauthorized user who doesn't but could try to brute force.

In page 81 of the previous version, the magic barrier to repel the swarming robots was automatically created. That was a convenient way to wrap up that page and the end of that chapter; the previous version always had chapters of 27 pages, not counting any extras. Since the webtoon episodes don't have that constraint, I could retcon this scene so that Midnight Conductor used Temporal Standstill, her spell to freeze time around her. This is a powerful spell that she can't keep up for very long and it'd take a lot of power to keep up, but Knockout had some spare superconductor crystals to give so the spell could be possible here!

Knockout's addition to the scene made this possible, and this let me show off another idea far sooner than I planned and I'm glad for that! I wanted to show off this spell at a later time, but it would've been in in a story arc far ahead.

This was one of the most ambitious new panels in the episode, and I watched the Time Stand Still music video. A song that's extremely relatable :')

When Midnight Conductor activated Temporal Standstill, I could've reused her weapon as it appeared in the previous panel. It would've been really tedious to adjust the positions of all of the nodes on her weapon to match the perspective that it should have in this panel, so I 3D modeled it and made the render to use as a reference!

This posed another challenge with blending 2D and 3D. I used techniques to paint over 3D backgrounds to blend them in with the art style, but with an item a character is holding, I needed to vector it for it blend in seamlessly. I tried some of the Trace Bitmap features and got some decent line art from the settings I tried, but still needed to vector every individual shape. I'm sure all these steps took a lot more time, but I'm more satisfied with this result and wanted to add extra visual impact into that panel!

The magic gear background reuses the gears and bubbles from the earlier background when Midnight Conductor's weapon changed forms. The base colors of the gears were tweaked to fit the orange lighting but when I put the lighting behind them to match how the lighting would be behind her, it was hard to see them and there was little contrast between them so I added a small level of Emission to them.

The most tedious part...

The color lighting effects! I added them to so many panels in this episode that it took hours and sometimes my hands hurt and I needed to take a break T__T

When I imported the episode into Krita, I manually painted in the lighting effects. Selecting roughly where to add them, using the fill tool and painting in the areas that were missed saved some time and effort, but this still took hours! I've been able to do these effects in Inkscape and have used them a lot in the previous comic version; the lighting effects would be made from several paths per panel since they often had gradients at different angles, but each of them would need to be adjusted if I wanted to adjust their color and brightness. If I needed to make any changes, adjusting them would be tedious.

It's been more efficient to do this step in Krita by putting the lighting effects in a layer that can be used across panels and to limit use of gradient lighting although I like the extra detail it offers. When I needed to change the color of lighting I'd just lock the layer and paint over the part that needed to be changed. Adjusting the brightness of the lighting which is usually in Soft Light mode is as simple as adjusting the opacity of the layer.

When I had only a few more panels to add the effects to, a method that might be a lot more efficient crossed my mind! How annoying that I didn't think about it until that late! Oh well, I could try it for the next episode and see how much time it'll save.

Episode 33

13 Feb 2023

This episode adapts pages 77 and 78 of the previous comic version. Panels from these pages are mostly kept, but with expansions to the glitchy and psychedelic visual effects, and new panels to expand on the scene!

WIP posts for this episode go into detail about these expansions, but there's still more to write about for the production of this episode! The dialogue was changed a lot, which led to some retcons and other changes:

Comparison to the previous comic version

In the previous version, Renegade Midnight was in a battle alone, tossed the extra transformation device she had to Katt since Katt happened to be someone there at the right place and time. Midnight didn't intend to initiate anyone then, and was surprised by how the device reacted when Katt held it and again when she could harness any part of its power without yet being initiated.

At the start of page 78, Midnight said "I'm so sorry! I didn't know this would happen!" When the device tried to overpower Katt. She then thought "Is she going to use its power?!" When Katt overcame it and gained control of it. I intended to explain this ability, its strengths and drawbacks but couldn't before the previous version got discontinued. :-(

Page 72 of the previous version established that she and Katt already knew each other somehow. For them to know each other already seemed a little too convenient and contrived in the previous version... unless Midnight Conductor might've saved Katt before some time in the second timeline. This'd give more of an explanation for how they could already know each other and be one of the reasons why Katt wants to join the Magical Renegades.

Episode 29 establishes that Katt wants to join the Magical Renegades and that she wants to seize the opportunity in the new timeline. Her and Kayla's parents asked if they were going to wait it out until they could return from the past, or if they wanted to shape their destinies and have a hand in what would most likely be ahead. Her motives shown in that episode are ambiguous though and that's intentional; does she want to join the Renegades because she thinks it's the right thing to do, does she want to fight for glory or just for the sake of fighting?

When writing stories, there may need to be some convenient allowances that help move the plot forward and keep the writer from being too bogged down by all of the details about how to go from one plot point to the next. It may be convenient that some characters already know each other or some things are in a protagonist's favor, but alternatives to those may be too difficult and time-consuming to write. They may also slow down the pace too much as to frustrate the writer and negatively affect the reading experience for the readers who would've preferred for the story to get to the point!

Additions

This episode expanded on the scene when Katt caught the initiation device from Renegade Midnight Conductor, but the device was trying to control or overpower her. The additions raise the stakes and add more tension!

Midnight regretted tossing the device to Katt and asked if Katt wants to toss it back; Midnight would've rather taken her chances with the League than for someone to get caught in the crossfire. Katt refused because she wanted to fight the robots and join the Magical Renegades!

Panels were added to show the robots closing in; this shows that Katt has a clear and short time limit to gain control of the device to keep herself from getting overpowered by it and to keep the device from getting captured!

The addition of Renegade Knockout Tango as a new character in the adaptation also led this scene to be expanded! She is in a support role. Panels were added to show more of her outfit, and to show her using her weapon to slow down the robots to buy Midnight and Katt a little more time.

To Blend or Not to Blend?

...That is the question!

I usually blend in 3D backgrounds to fit the art style. When drawing in 2D and using 3D backgrounds, blending the 3D model backgrounds is widely recommended because not blending them can feel distracting to readers; this is also the case with 2D and 3D animation that isn't smoothly blended.

The techniques I've been using to blend backgrounds haven't been the most efficient although I like the effects. I painted over the shading of the background so it's more cel-shaded, but with a watercolor brush. Using a watercolor brush gives scenes a style of 80's and 90's anime; characters with bold blocks of color for the shading and highlights with painted backgrounds.

In this episode I didn't blend the glitchy 3D render backgrounds because I wanted them to stand out more! Not blending 3D backgrounds or models when the rest of a scene is 2D can be a stylistic choice to make the 3D things seem more jarring or otherworldly. The first episode to have 3D backgrounds that deliberately weren't blended was episode 5 in a scene of a time rift!

Retcons in episode 33

They might not have already known each other, but Midnight knows from one of her teammates that most of the guests at the Stranded Inn Time hotel have good potential as recruits. In episode 32, she instructed Midnight to fly to the hotel and fire a warning flare in the chance that a good candidate will help. This was still risky, but it seemed like the best immediate option to keep the extra initiation device away from the hands of The League.

It's still unusual that the device immediately reacted to Katt when she held it, as if the device was testing her. She was able to harness it without being initiated, which is unusual. The strengths and drawbacks to this would be explored this time!

Episode 32

26 Jan 2023

There are a lot of notes for this episode because there are a lot of changes!

This episode adapted pages 74-76 of the previous comic version, but is a looser adaptation of pages than episode 31. Nearly all the panels from pages 163-167 fit in with episode 31, but more panels from the pages that episode 32 adapts were left out to rewrite major details. The panels that were used were re-arranged between new scenes, and events from the previous versions across chapters were re-arranged!

At the start of episode 32, Katt is lying in bed because of her injuries. This alludes to a scene that was in-progress in the previous comic version before it was discontinued. She ran to the time travel office with Alicia, Kayla and Melody. They were keeping a steady pace, but Katt had the idea to jump across trees to get to the office more quickly, and tried a stunt and wanted to show off, but she missed one of the trees, got tangled in vines and fell! She would've wanted for her friends to continue to the office without her, and would've made it there at the last minute!

This scene will carry on as one of the events to be mentioned in chapter 14 of Extra! Chronicles. It's better suited as a chapter than part of an episode, and drawing out the scenes of the new arrivals reporting to the time travel office in the previous version was the final straw of pacing problems that did it in. I was only able to finish and publish one page a week at the most, so every page counted! The start of chapter 7 of the previous version was meant to be slice-of-life segments that showed more about characters' lives as they handled a mundane task, but I just couldn't keep my attention on this comic form.

I could get through several other slower scenes because the next battle or major lore reveals were in sight, but not with this one. The next major arc I had planned was just spaced too far away. Writing a long-form webcomic or webtoon takes so much patience and to keep hope in ideas that may be weeks, months or years away from drawing! Spacing and pacing are so important!

Additions

In page 74 of the previous version, there were a few panels of Renegade Midnight Conductor's fight against the League's robots that were trying to capture her and steal the extra transformation device that she had. This was expanded into a longer scene that showed her talking to another of the Renegades through a headset. It made more sense for Midnight Conductor to not do her mission entirely alone, and for another Renegade to help her find a way to escape.

The teammate helping her is Renegade Knockout Tango! Her codename is based on two colors; Knockout is a bright shade of pink or magenta, and Tango is a light red.

There's also a monologue about her worries about the risks of trying to recruit another member now to help her fight and to keep the League from taking that initiation or startup device. I'd been using "transformation device" before but I've gravitated towards calling them "initiation devices" or "startup devices" instead!

A monologue was also added for Katt when she rushed to catch the initiation device. This line "I'll be one of the people she said has potential to be initiated if I'm not one already!" Is similar to how Susana was originally unsure if she had what it took when she was offered the chance to join the Magical Renegades, but wanted to become someone who could be counted on. I had to leave this off-panel, but from the second timeline, Susana wrote an autobiography that was famous, and it's the same one that Paige read from in chapters 3 and 4 of Extra! Chronicles. Katt would've known about Susana's thoughts on becoming a Renegade from it.

Another card

The card stack idea from the Fateful Stack of Choices spin-off shows up again and I should add a page about it! It was first included into Anathema to Commonsense in episode 16. Midnight Conductor has a few of the cards of the most disastrous outcome!

She doesn't have any other cards that could provide any context for how this could happen though!

Other changes

The dialogue between Katt and Kayla on pages 74 and 75 of the previous version was changed to be more serious. There was still a bit of room for Kayla to snark but even she is worried about Katt trying to run outside while she is still injured.

The rest of the panels from page 75 are mostly the same, but when Renegade Midnight Conductor asks for Katt's help, Katt knows more in this version than she did the previous one. In the second timeline, she knew of the Magical Renegades and wanted to join them although that possibility seemed so far away; she might've crossed paths with them not too long before she was taken to the third timeline!

In the previous version, she asked about what would happen if she missed, and if the machines would chase after her since she wasn't sure she could defend herself from them. Midnight explained that Katt could borrow the power of the magical device she catches to defend herself from the machines.

Katt knowing more about this in the new version than before also ties back into the end of the courtroom scene from episode 19. This introduced that the Magic Gatekeepers don't like the Magical Renegades, but see them as the most likely last hope for anyone to overthrow the League and restore space-time since the Gatekeepers' own rules don't let them use their full power unless there is an immediate crisis!

Removed

These panels showing Katt operating a steampunk-style computer in the hotel had to be removed since it contradicts the new scene at the start of the episode, and the updated designs for the hotel rooms don't include computers. :(

This removed panel also shows that the hotel rooms previously had an Art Deco-inspired style which I intended to keep when the hotel was introduced in episode 27, but switched to a vaporwave style!

The scene at the end of page 76 when Katt fell into a mud puddle after she caught the pocketwatch was also removed. I thought over whether to keep or remove it since it would help determine the note the episode would end. Although I like silly moments and wanted to keep this one, I ultimately removed it because it took away from the tension and sense of urgency of the scene at the wrong time.

It worked as a punchline in the page format, but this was also one of the wrong scenes to reduce tension and urgency from; Katt successfully caught a hold of the transformation device that Renegade Midnight Conductor threw to her, but there will immediately be two problems ahead; how the device reacts to Katt and her having to worry about how she'd defend herself against the League's robots!

Episode 31

31 Dec 2022

This episode adapts some of the last pages from the previous comic version but expands on them with extra panels. When I made the comic pages, they needed to be more compressed because I wanted to fit plenty of details on each page while I considered the panel layout and how the layout affects the readability. Since my update schedule then was usually publishing one page a week, I didn't want to stretch out scenes very much even if that could give a more theatrical flair, and I wanted to keep the page sizes consistent.

A scene from page 163. There wasn't enough space to fit a panel that showed the radio on the page, but it wouldn't have been needed. The webtoon adaptation of this scene adds extra panels to flow between parts of the dialogue, and cuts to a panel showing the radio.

Legionnaire Imperatrix's speech over the morning radio was expanded on to convey more details, and parts of it were spread out over several panels which included recaps of the events she had a had in at the start of the third timeline. I feel like this is easier to do with the vertical webtoon format, and even with a slow update schedule, I'm still publishing several panels at once which would've been the equivalent to at least a few pages!

These recapped events were from episodes 20-23, so check those out to see the full versions! This episode was something of a clip show because of the recaps since these episodes were from around a year ago, but it also gave more of a visual impact to space out the speech with more panels. I looked back at these episodes and thought over which panels to use from them, and wanted to include at least one of the highlights which was Renegade Liberty's Final Impact attack!

This episode also brought out the use of Infini-D and BrushStrokes again! The last 2 3D backgrounds were made with these programs! When I started modeling 3D backgrounds for episode 5, I was more proficient with that than I was with Blender! I could recreate those backgrounds in Blender and could for a challenge, but at this point it's become a stylistic rule that the 3D visuals in the time portals and around the Magic Gatekeepers' superweapons are modeled with Infini-D! Several of these backgrounds are in episodes 5, 9, 10, 11 and 13.5.

Errors

During the phone booth scene at the start of the episode, the perspective shows Catherine talking to someone on the phone booth screen, but the screen is off-panel. During the conversation, the perspective changes and shows Catherine on the screen.

When I added the panels of Catherine being seen on the phone booth screen from the other person's perspective, I planned to edit those panels to have Catherine fit that screen when I'd add the finishing touches in Krita, but I forgot before I published the episode!

This error was corrected, but I also realized that the easier option all along would've been in Inkscape: Make the panel of Catherine a group, make a path that fits the shape of the screen, and use Object >> Clip >> Set to fit that panel of Catherine within the screen! I've used this command a lot to fit characters and backgrounds into panels, but it slipped my mind this time. I had been busy and tired a lot, thought I looked the episode over enough times to catch bloopers, but I also rushed to complete this episode and have it ready to post before the end of the year!

Episode 30

1 Nov 2022

It would've taken too long to how everyone's answers to the survival question game in the episode, but "If you could take only 3 things with you" is a good writing exercise to do for characters! This question can show a character's values and personality with just a few items and their reasoning!

This is the last all-new episode for a while since the next several episodes will be adaptations of pages from the previous comic version. There'll still be some surprises and new panels!

Writing this episode was daunting because it's about a stand-up comedy act, but that drawing I made during Sketchtember helped set the tone for the episode! This episode was daunting to start for the same reason a lot of writers may allude to someone telling "the funniest joke", but never write it out. Whatever the writer intended as "the funniest joke" likely won't meet everyone’s expectations in an audience since some will likely have a different sense of humor. It may be better for the audience to individually imagine what it is.

The other survival question games could be left to the imagination, also because how much longer the episode would've taken if I showed everything. Other ideas I considered if episode length and production time weren't an issue were a Family Feud-style game where the audience needed to guess the most practical survival items that were on the screen and members of the audience volunteering to act survival situations on stage.

Ella and Fiorina would've consistently had the best answers to the questions. Kayla's, Melody's and Felicity's would been decent. Melody would've thought more practically about these questions than she would have before since the opportunity to break her family's curse now feels like it’s within reach.

Katt had impractical answers for the "If you could take only 3 things with you" game but wasn't trying to give bad answers! Her answers may have included "stunt performer costume" and "motorcycle"!

This could've been a time for Kayla to joke with her answers, but she decided to take the questions seriously to show off her knowledge.

There weren't weekly WIP posts this month, because instead I wrote about my progress every day for a challenge for October!

More about the production of this episode is covered in a comic challenge I did throughout October.

This post covered the production of part of episode 30 through the start of episode 31 with a lot of commentary about the process. Writing this also helped me write about the production process section on my page about Magical Renegades!

Episode 29

This is part 2 of the first night, and this would’ve been part of episode 28. The last episode introduces the hotel and is a lead-in to the second part of the night which a lot more character- and lore-heavy! This is the second part of 3 before the next day, and the next arc!

Several characters get the chance to use a phone booth to make calls across space and time to talk with people from the previous timeline where it left off, which shows their motivations for surviving the new timeline! Some of these may be silly, but others are very serious, such as the hardship that Melody’s family has and whether there’s an opportunity to prevent it.

Episode 28

15 Aug 2022

This was another episode that had an extensive use of 3D backgrounds. Moving forward I may keep modeling interior backgrounds in 3D if I expect that I'll need to use them from different angles.

The design of the hotel interior is fairly simple since the vaporwave aesthetic for rooms tends to use minimalist furniture, a lot of pastel colors or white throughout the room. Furniture or pillows often are metallic too; the better to reflect the lighting with! These colors and metallic effects easily take on the color of the lighting, which is the real star of the room! The furniture is very quick to model from scratch, and the metallic cushions were also easy to make.

However, this simplicity was offset by the need to figure out where the staircases would be placed on each of the hotel floors and figuring out logical layouts for them! Yet I may have spent more time than was necessary at least during the production of this episode because the staircase to the third floor didn't appear in the episode. I could've just placed the staircase to the second floor since it was needed in some of the panels, but I also wanted to be prepared in case there was a shot of anyone going to the third floor.

A full model of parts of the hotel would be an ambitious project and could be fitting for a portfolio piece, but I modeled several parts of the hotel since they were needed for interior scenes in the webtoon so I need to prioritize the areas that'd appear in panels. It'd be more efficient to know exactly what I'll need to show in an episode, and I could add on to more of the hotel later. Since the next episode or two will also take place in the hotel, production of it will be easier.

There is at least one more room I'll need to model for the next episode, which would be an auditorium, but it should be simple enough. I haven't tried to model an auditorium or another room with rows of chairs before, but I'd imagine that the Array modifier will be extremely handy for this!

The next step has been modeling the interior of the phone booth. It has a round screen with a camera above it, and a control panel below it. The control panel will be used to enter the information needed to make a call across space and time. A microphone a holographic keyboard will be added in!

Episode 27

25 Jul

In comparison to the production of episode 26, episode 27 was a lot simpler. This episode is an adaptation of existing pages from the previous comic version, but there were several new panels in the first section to slow down the pace a bit, and extra panels at the end to show off vaporwave aesthetics. This was to focus on the characters and their reactions to suddenly being warped from the courtroom to the city plaza, after they had just been put on trial after the space-time continuum crashed! This group's first day in the new timeline was incredibly hectic that there should be some breathing room.

A change in style!

The design for the Stranded Inn Time hotel was heavily based on Art Deco style. I kept the exterior the same as it's still one of my favorite architecture styles, but when I was looking for reference pictures of hotel lobbies since I considered showing interior shots of the hotel, I got inspired to make the interior vaporwave!

I may have spent more time than I needed designing the lobby, but I got carried away when I was looking for references and found articles about the principles of lobby design! ^^;

A Hybrid Technique

The hotel lobby panel is a composite between renders of the same shot in the Cycles and Eevee engines. I made identical renders in Blender, resized them to fit the size of the webtoon panel and imported them into Krita.

Without any blending, the Eevee render fits more closely with the art style, but I like the extra lighting effects and reflections that the Cycles render has.

The Cycles render was placed on a higher layer over the Eevee render, but with an opacity that's not 100%. I wanted it to be around 50-80% to show the smoother shapes of the Eevee render while keeping some of the reflections and lighting from the Cycles render.

Denoising the Cycles render was tedious. I didn't use the automatic de-noiser with Blender because Blender sometimes crashed on me when I tried. Not taking my chances with that, I decided to just manually de-noise the render in Krita although it took a lot longer than if I successfully rendered it with the de-noiser, but perhaps I should have tried it! I tried with the automatic de-noiser on one of the first rendered backgrounds for episode 28. It worked without crashing! ^^;

It feels risky to do that because the Cycles renders take minutes to complete, and Blender has crashed at the end of a render and I lost all progress with it. This happened before when I rendered one of the backgrounds in episode 25 multiple times. I'm not using the latest version, but I'm willing to upgrade to it if it's more stable than the version I'm using.

While I tried different layer modes for the Cycles layer to see if there was one that could blend both layers more smoothly than the Normal mode, Addition seemed to be one of the best for what I needed, and what I used, but the Divide mode produced such a cool aesthetic effect!

Extra! Chronicles Chapter 13

7 Jul

Both sites were updated today after finishing some updates that were overdue!

On 90's Resort, Chapter 13 of Extra! Chronicles was published! The text was finished but I forgot to make a thumbnail image when it was ready to publish so that held it up! ^^;

This is the first chapter with a mood whiplash warning. This chapter takes place around the same evening as episode 26 of Anathema to Commonsense. They can be read in either order, but I'd recommend reading episode 26 before this chapter.

When I began to export the line art for the illustrations in chapter 12, I started drafting a tutorial about how I did the coloring. The tutorial is on the home page.

Episode 26 and episode 27 preview

26 Jun

After 2 months in production, episode 26 of Anathema to Commonsense was finally released! During its production, episodes 10-12 of Extra! Chronicles were also written and published. Other than when juggling those chapters, some incremental progress was made on episode 26 nearly every day.

This was the longest episode yet, and it extensively used 3D backgrounds! The longest part of production again was the modeling them since most parts of them were made from scratch!

Producing 3D models from scratch starts out very slow, but they can be reused even in different scenes to save on production time later. Free resources can also help cut down on production time, though I haven't used very many! ^^; The walls, wooden paneling, the couch, and the posts from the top of the staircase were reused from my models of the Magical Renegades HQ arcade room. The stairs, doors and windows were made with the Archimesh add-on.

Each of the 3D backgrounds for this episode were rendered without Freestyle since I haven't been able to get consistent results with it yet. I manually drew the lineart and painted over the shading to look more cel-shaded and blend them in with the art style. It may not be completely seamless without vectoring over everything because my hand-drawn lineart is sometimes shaky, but vectoring over them may take even longer.

It's a trade-off between blending in a way that may save time but not be perfectly seamless, and blending in a way that'd be perfectly seamless but may take even more time.

Episode 27 preview

Chapter 13 of Extra! Chronicles and episode 27 of Anathema to Commonsense are in-progress now! Chapter 13 is almost finished and will be the next update. The rest of the interview in episode 26 will be in it!

Episode 27 resumes adapting the previous comic version, but will add several extra panels to give characters who haven't been seen as much more screen time. It'll start with a quick recap covering the events from episodes 8-19 since those were published so long ago!

Transcriptions:

Moments after that, the space-time continuum was falling apart and needed to be rebooted!

The Magic Gatekeepers, the heads of the Magestablishment and the judges of the highest cosmic court, put the unlucky group on trial for questioning!"

Camelia had photos that proved the groups' innocence, and the perpetrator showed up to brag about her actions!

Transcriptions:

After this spectacle was over, the Magic Gatekeepers provided critical information to anyone who'd be daring enough to use it.

They warned that their rules don't allow them to fight this new threat directly unless the threat became an imminent disaster to space-time, but they told of how someone could.

Episode 25 production notes

22 Apr

After multiple WIPs, there's still something to say about the production about this episode!

It's out of order because I forgot I didn't publish this before the first episode 26 WIP! ^^;

There was incremental progress on it every day between its release and the release of episode 24. Modeling the backgrounds in the Magical Renegades HQ may have taken at least half of the total production time since I didn't just model them, but also decided on the colors and textures. I had to figure out UV mapping quickly for this to make the textures display properly. Out of everything I've learned so far in Blender, I dreaded UV mapping the most because I was confused by some tutorials, but I just needed to find the right tutorial to help me understand it.

On just the wall clock, arcade cabinets, couch and staircase, I spent hours on those! ^^; The panels just showing furniture and decor were so those wouldn't go to waste. When I modeled the backgrounds, I couldn't be sure how much would be cut off when they were scaled down for the panels, but as it turned out, it was a lot! About half of the width was cut off.

Caption: I spent hours modeling this couch and this is all I'd have to show for it?! Not if I put a panel showing it off!

Here came the next hard part...

• Research references
• Sketching backgrounds and furniture
• Modeling them
• → Blending the backgrounds

Blending the 3D renders into the style of the webtoon! Without any blending, they'd stick out too much, and not when I want that! I tried multiple techniques in this episodes, but wasn't consistent because different ones worked better for some of the backgrounds.

The shading in the 3D backgrounds for this episode were painted over a bit to make them closer to cel-shaded. The walls had watercolor textures to them, some wood trim had wood grain added to them, and metal objects had their line art colored over. The shading was sometimes simplified on the metal objects.

I got more practice when I tried these out with the backgrounds I showed in the WIPs, but a new obstacle appeared in the hallway backgrounds!

They make use of damask wallpaper patterns! The renders of this room looked fine as they were when the walls were all solid colors, but it felt a little *incomplete*. Damask wallpapers are one of those staples of Victorian architecture so I added them to some of the walls. I think they contrast well with one of the walls that was kept a solid color. It feels more balanced, but painting over the shading on patterns is more difficult. There needed to be a workaround.

This is the workaround I did in Krita! Pretty exhausting, isn't it?

• The base layer has the hallway render.
• On the base layer, select the area that has the wallpaper pattern.
• Copy and paste it into a new document. This should automatically create a new layer. Use Levels to adjust the input or output so the base background color becomes white or very close to white while keeping enough detail in the pattern.
• Set the mode of this layer to Multiply. This makes anything white invisible and would only leave the wallpaper pattern.
• Go to the base layer or create a new layer below it that is Normal mode. Fill it with white or a very light version of the original base color.
• Merge the layers, copy and paste into the file with the whole background.
• Set this pasted background which will be on a new layer to Multiply if it isn't already. Line it up with the wallpaper. This will be easy when the pasted background is in Multiply mode.
• Create a layer between it and the base layer for the block of shading. The pattern on the above layer will be affected by the colors below it.

Eevee, Cycles, or both renders?

Most of the backgrounds were rendered in Eevee with Freestyle to generate line art because it's easier to blend them... Except for the hallway with the window and curtains. They were rendered in Cycles without Freestyle, because those results looked better. I manually traced the line art for it because I couldn't avoid messy creases in the curtains when I rendered it in Freestyle, and the colors looked better in Cycles. Perhaps I could but don't know how to do that yet.

The panels showing the staircase had two renders, and the Eevee render was used as the base, but some colors were taken from the copy rendered in Cycles, because the colors in Cycles are more vibrant; the metallic surfaces look closer to how I intended them. I used the render in Eevee as the base and painted over some of the metal surfaces to look like how they were rendered in Cycles in most of them.

Comparing the same render in both engines also helps me with which shadows to keep and which should be painted over.

The cloth simulator wasn't used to model the curtains. They were just modeled from planes that were molded into shape to save time. I haven't had the best of luck figuring out how to use the cloth simulator to render curtains yet for it to be more efficient.

Here we go again?!

The next episode is also going to be completely new and have more backgrounds to model! I already spent a few hours sketching floor plans for the basement of the HQ and made sketches of the panels! This might not be so bad though since I expect there will be scenes in this part of the HQ again at a later time. The first WIP for episode 26 will be up soon!

Episode 24

23 Jan

The first of a behind the scenes production about the extra steps of episode 24. The Behind the Scenes category isn't new here, but it's new on Record Compendium for a post category about the production process! It's in place to separate these non-lore posts from the rest of the other posts.

Since this episode will take a lot longer to complete for the amount of panels that need to be drawn instead of just being revamped, I'll be posting periodic updates about the process, which could be compiled into an article later.

I'm planning to focus a lot more on written material this year that I'll clear out these ideas that were stuck on the back burner. It'll feel good to get them done.

How a new episode sprung up

"...I'm not sure if I could do those (art summaries) without cheating for some of the months because the episodes are still adaptations of comic pages. It'll be a while before the episodes would be completely new!" -2021 in Review

So much for that! XD

A team effort to stop those enemies caused collateral damage? This wasn't commented on-panel!

This scene from the previous comic needed to be expanded on because Renegade Liberty stayed long enough to see the king's and queen's reaction to finding that their yard was destroyed in the battle in episode 23.

In the comic, she suddenly disappeared just as Eminence Danger announced that she was going to defect and form a new group, and offered for Liberty to join it. This was going to be treated as a mystery, because Liberty's whereabouts were unknown since then. A later chapter was going to show Susana's whereabouts and disillusionment in the new timeline. The fame she accrued as Susana and as Renegade Liberty could've gotten to her. :-(

Liberty suddenly disappearing didn't make sense in the comic because she didn't have the ability to teleport. Eminence Danger and Midnight Conductor do because they're time travelers.

From having Liberty stay long enough to see the king and queen, I needed an explanation for why she needed to leave early. Her weapon was about to run out of power, and if it completely ran out, she'd revert back to her normal form in front of them. While I jotted down a script for this new scene, I needed to consider more details for the next scene:

• Showing Susana returning to the headquarters
• Whether any of the other Renegades would get cameo appearances
• If any of them knew about Eminence Danger's plans
• Their reactions
• Whether the celebratory banquet would be shown in the episode, or if that could be saved for the next Extra! Chronicles chapter

The details that I expanded on spilled into episode 25, which will be entirely new!

Episode 23

16 Jan 2022

Refining the pitch

The description for Anathema to Commonsense was tweaked again. This is the new version:

What's going to be next?

Chapter 10 of Extra! Chronicles was going to be next, but it's going to be pushed back to be released between episodes 24 and 25.

Episode 24 is going to be another large update, and be almost entirely new! I spoke too soon when I said it was a long ways away before the episodes would be completely new, after adapting the last of the pages that were published from 2019!

The production will have extra steps that there will be multiple WIPs to share!

Episode 22

23 Dec 2021

A pair of extra strips that were made about the aftermath. These were before the reboot, and may also be adapted to show the king’s and queen’s combat outfits in full-color, and may be the basis for another chapter of Extra! Chronicles!

Episode 22 is expected to be the last episode of the year. It’d be a fitting episode to end this year of episodes with, but it won’t be the last update for the year. There’s one more or two of lighthearted extra stories and art challenges I can sneak in! 🙂

Episode 21

1 Dec 2021

This is an expansion of how the the showdown at the point of divergence of the third timeline started. Teasel gets an establishing moment with her banter against Renegade Liberty.

The part of Renegade Liberty's that was shown was translated for our convenience. It might've been unwieldy to write all of that in Pig Latin.

Pre-episode 21 note

Episode 16

12 Mar 2021

The next moments were a sudden cliffhanger! 😆

Next time... This was the last flashy introduction to the court room!

What’s in the cards?

Legionnaire Imperatrix presented some cards from a mysterious stack.

The first in a series of cards in black and white. Legionnaire Imperatrix in a close-up from the side view. Her eyes are obscured and she is upset. She is wearing a magical girl outfit loosely based off of an older-style military uniform. The bottom of the card reads "I'm going to forge my own path..."

The first was from a different time in her life. It was captioned "I'm going to forge my own path..." She looked upset over something. She was going to reach a turning point.

In the next card she is wearing a black dress with black gloves and a domino mask, and is carrying a large staff with glowing ribbons to the side of it, illuminating her and the background. She has a triumphant expression on her face. "That was close, but I got away with it! This super weapon is mine!"

The third card had solid black screen, only captioned "She tried to steal one of the super weapons, but got caught, and faces her demise". There is no forward arrow button on the card. These represented different outcomes for when she attempted to steal one of the Magic Gatekeepers' superweapons.

Two cards with identical drawings of the time rift. The first of the two is captioned "You enter the time rift and fly towards the center." The second is captioned "Will you take anyone out of the rift to the palace?" With two option buttons for Yes and No.

The final two cards she presented were identical in appearance aside from their captions and the option buttons. They captured her moments in the time rift while space-time fell apart. The picture was of the time rift. "You enter the time rift and fly towards the center." The first read. "Will you take anyone out of the rift to the palace?" Which also had two buttons for "Yes" and "No"; she had chosen yes to bring two of the people in the rift with her; Claudia and Chelsea.

Episode 14

23 Jan 2021

The introduction of another faction, and it's fancy! ✨

Decked out in steampunk and rococo aesthetics is the League of Paine!

What would the equivalent of steampunk be called when it's rococo fashion with punk elements? 🤔

They're another faction that uses magical weaponry that the Renegades have, but are a newer faction and more powerful. What's the leader's secret to their power? Grand theft of one of the Magic Gatekeepers' super weapons, a time travel gambit to reboot space-time and become the ruling party in a new timeline while exploiting a loophole in the Magic Gatekeepers' rules!

Episode 13.5

9 Jan 2021

The Magic Gatekeepers are the most powerful of the character classes in magical power. They have power over the space-time continuum, and are the top of the magical bureaucracy. The rules they enforce are of their making, but they don't always like them. If they broke their rules, Mia could’ve gotten revenge against the time traveler who stole her superweapon, but there would've been dire consequences!

2020 production in review

31 Dec 2020

An adaptation almost 2 years in the making!

Not 2 consecutive years.

It started in May 2018, with the outcome that I expected: Stalling on and off when I tried to juggle it with the pages! 😄 Not good... I dropped it for a while, and it likely would've stalled indefinitely in development hell if I didn't get bored continuing the pages.

The webtoon was going to be a straight adaptation that ran alongside them. The panels were going to be re-arranged with only revamps and slight tweaks to the dialogue. I gave the format a try because I liked it, and wanted to use it, but I soon felt discouraged.

It was the same thing over again that didn't overcome the missed opportunities I felt from the beginning. It was a time sink. Sunk costs. I could’ve been working on more pages I told myself, and put the webtoon on hold. The delays worked in my favor, and bought me more time to consider a different approach.

Since the panels and dialogue were going to be revamped, I wouldn’t have been happy to stop there. Polishing the dialogue went steps further. I had developed an interest in worldbuilding, and focusing more on the characters when it hit me... I had a renewed outlook on the webtoon that would make substantially rewriting the first chapters worth the time.

This was a new opportunity to set the pacing right, expand on the lore, and make the presentation more polished! I used this idea to guide the webtoon.

This scene was expanded to show Susana's thoughts about what Aurora was telling her. Being told that she could become a mage with no strings attached would seem too good to be true. She was cautious when she agreed, but was going to back out of it if she felt like it was still a scam after she was given a demonstration.

A snippet of the demonstration that Susana was given before her initiation. Leaving this out was a missed opportunity to begin introducing the magic system a lot sooner.

Episodes 1 and 2 introduced that humans are often preyed on by mages who want to scam them out of their money with fake potions, fake cures, or fake magic rituals. The classical mages that aren’t scammers don’t like them, but the Renegades hate these scammers because they destroyed the Renegades’ credibility to many humans, who would’ve wanted to be recruited into joining them.

Going the extra mile!

The extra stories that accompany some episodes sprung from this new approach. They’ve usually started spontaneously from an extra setting or character idea I wanted to put in the episode, or it took place at a different time from the episode.

Episode 2 extra "The Initiation For a New Renegade! Liberty makes her debut!": Shows the events of episode 2 that were off-screen.

Episode 4 extra "Tempers flare after the party?! Clash between the seasoned and new Renegades!": This story sprung from how the Magical Renegades would react to the classical mages who used to shun and mistreat them having a change in heart after the king’s and queen's royal decree. They didn't personally attack any of the Renegades, but upheld the system that permitted other classical mages to do so. Before the decree, the Renegades were wanted dead or imprisoned by most of the classical mages.

Avogadro is more willing to let bygones be bygones, but he's from an aristocratic background. The aristocratic classical mages might've let him back into the fold if he'd just give up on being part of the Renegades. Christina was a commoner and human who was bullied by aristocrats before she joined the Renegades, and risked death at their hands after she joined them.

Episode 7 extra "In Another Timeline, This Palace Could've Been Hers!": This story sprung from Chelsea's thoughts about the school she attends; a palace that could’ve been hers, had it not been turned into a school... A school that a lot of commoners go to! This is terrible to her, and reminds her of her family's losses. She has a conversation with a friend who goes to Pretentia, the elite academy.

Episode 7.5 extra "After She Found One Resolution, Another Mystery of Life and Death!": This story branched off from Aurora finding out how The Great Power Struggle was resolved in the second timeline, after she had to warp away. There was one detail that Aurora couldn't get a certain answer... Was Susana still alive as a mage who exceeded the normal human lifespan? No reports of her death could be found, but there were no reports that she was still alive.

There’s more!

The relaunch as a webtoon, and the extra episode stories compounded my interest in reviving the blog with a voice that it didn’t have before.

You see, before the reboot, the update posts were usually boring to write when they were being written one or two pages at a time. They were updates that broadcasted the latest pages, but didn’t add anything extra.

More content can be condensed in a webtoon episode than a single page that there's more I could write commentary about for each individual update. I also started taking to writing narration at the beginning of the posts that complements the header image, and leads into the link to the episode, and sometimes adds extra details about the lore. All in all, this has been a much more satisfying approach to writing the update announcements.

I participated in two drawing challenges this year; JOKETOBER in October, and Huevember in November. It didn't take very long for me to make drawings that took more than a day to complete, but completion isn’t my main goal yet.

The drawings led to extra story ideas, or were based off of extra ideas that built on to the lore. Updating the blog became fun again as I could accomplish what I wanted to for it; to be a repository of extra content that’d add on to the reader experience.

The year in a quick summary

The header is a visual summary of Magical Renegades in 2020. The relaunch as a webtoon, the first drawing of the first art challenge I participated in for the year, the last full episode, and the last completed drawing of the year.

Episode 11

1 Nov 2020

This has been one of the longest episodes as of yet, and it took a lot of extra time to expand on the Magic Gatekeepers' introductions. They're the top enforcers of the magical establishment, and the webtoon format helped a lot to make their introductions more grandiose while keeping them in one update.

Episode 10

12 Oct 2020

As with episode 5, this episode extensively incorporated 3D visuals for the otherwordly scenes!

Episode 8

19 Sep 2020

A few more characters are introduced in this episode. Two of them got proper introductions, and the other three will later. Their introductions and characterizations will be retooled. I'm unsure if I’ll do any art challenges soon, but they'd be an opportunity to focus on the characters that haven't appeared as much.

Episode 6

15 Aug 2020

Producing this episode slowed down the update schedule. Extensive changes were made from the sections it adapted, and this episode was so long that it got split twice!

Episode 5

3 Aug 2020

What could've been

These are what the time rift panels were going to look like until I had another idea!:

What's old is new

The 3D effects and the backgrounds in the time portal were rendered in Infini-D, and the 2D backgrounds and some textures were made in Claris BrushStrokes running under System 7.5 before porting them over. I chose programs from the 90's because I wanted that 90's CGI look for these scenes.

The CGI of the 90's and before look rough compared to modern programs, but has a charm to it that I like. CGI can be used to give scenes an unnatural or otherwordly look which can be intentional, but it was intentional here.

These programs work very well for the abstract backgrounds I wanted to make for the time rift, and those backgrounds were the most fun part of making this episode! I have more ideas to incorporate more rendered backgrounds and effects into the more otherwordly scenes, but I didn't stop there! The header image for this episode and episode 4.5 are new with rendered backgrounds, instead of being collages to render more things!

Episode 4.5

26 Jul 2020

The featured image for this post, and the background at the end of the episode are a preview of what's to come next in old programs I tried out and have been using a lot! The 90's CGI look is intentional and will be used in otherwordly scenes.

This is a half-episode, because episode 4 would've been too long if these panels were a part of it, but it's too short to feel like a full episode. These could've fit with episode 5, but episode 5 would've been further delayed.

Episode 4

18 Jul 2020

This episode has a few new scenes, expanding on what happened after the showdown! One of them couldn't make it, but Renegade Liberty, Renegade Midnight Conductor, and Susana were invited by the queen to a celebratory banquet!

The Magical Renegades had been mistrusted and shunned by the classical mage elite, and many of the other classical mages, but were accepted at last after stopping a threat that would've laid ruin to the country! The king and queen regretted ever supporting the crackdowns against the Magical Renegades. They had just been following in their predecessors' footsteps and believed that the Magical Renegades would be a threat for how they appear to cheat the magic bureaucracy, and threaten the balance of power between the magical classes.

While the Magical Renegades members would be happy to be accepted at last, some of them might not be able to, or want to forgive so easily. Thinking about this led to writing an episode 4 extra! It's still a work in progress, but the first part of it is ready to post as a preview.

Episode 3

21 Jun 2020

This was one of the most time-consuming parts to adapt into an episode, that it caused delays, but I tried to make shine the most by making when Renegade Liberty supercharged her weapon to have the most impact!

As a webtoon episode, it felt easier to convey the buildup, and convey it all in one update. I could've spaced this scene out over more pages in the page format, but I always tried to include as much as I could on each page because updates were once a week... when posted on time.

The finishing touches in Krita took several hours. Several panels had texture and lighting effects that were added manually.

Episode 2

10 May 2020

This episode is heavily changed from the pages it's adapted from. All of the panels starting from the 4th are new. They expand on how Susana feels about Aurora's claims that she can become a mage seemingly without any strings attached and also show a glimpse of Aurora's magical alter-ego!

In the original timeline, Susana became a witch, a mage of darkness under contract with the Minions of Nemesis, the demon-aligned faction. She made a deal with them to become a witch to grant her the power she needed. She eventually used that power against them, but as with any witch or warlock, she risked losing her soul and becoming a demon if she got too corrupted by the power she was granted, or if she failed to hold up her end of the deal.

This episode also establishes that magic and technology can coexist, though the mages typically don't want for magic to change, and support the establishment. This is where the Magical Renegades stand in opposition to them (the "classical mages" or the "establishment mages"), and set themselves apart. They're also known as Nova-class mages; "nova" meaning "new", but also referring to the stars called novas, which shine very brightly.

Technical difficulties

This episode would've been posted last weekend, but was delayed due to technical difficulties. The battery in my PC stylus died, and I had to buy a replacement battery which is difficult to find in stores. That stylus battery came with my PC, and lasted it a good while; close to 2 years when I drew nearly every day! The other issue was that Inkscape 0.47, the trusty vector graphics program I've used for many years stopped launching, so I uninstalled it and downloaded 0.92.5. It has some nice new features, but it was so slow to run!

The tweaks I needed to make to episode 3 took 3 hours to complete, when they would've taken an hour at most in 0.47. I opened Task Manager to see if there was a memory leak, and it was taking up 4-5 GB of RAM! I considered replacing it with 1.0, which I heard has performance improvements, but I wasn't sure yet how stable it would be, though its new features look very useful. I went with version 0.48.5, which installed in just a few minutes, uses far less RAM, and runs like a champ!

Episode 1 and re-launch!

25 Apr 2020

Magical Renegades Anathema to Commonsense has relaunched as a webtoon after a months-long hiatus!

I see each of the merits in the page and webtoon formats, but Magical Renegades got too difficult for me to want to continue in the page format. I was also dissatisfied with the early rushed introductions and pacing problems. The posts about the next episodes will explore and explain the changes that were made, and I have plans for writing about the production process.

Here's a transcription since the resolution is so low for the second preview:

There are new scenes added in to expand on character interactions and details that had been brushed over. How did Susana trust the time traveler who said she'd be in the history books? There’s more of an explanation now!

A relaunch, but not completely starting over

This relaunch will be a fresh start that has been in development for the past few months. Most of the scenes from the pages will carry over to the webtoon version, with tweaks. Scenes will be expanded on, and others cut to improve the pacing, or because some characters will be retooled and introduced later to be more impactful.

Episodes 1 and 2 will be an expansion that will explain how Aurora and Susana met, and how Susana agreed to become a mage.

Being a human living in a rural area, and the predominantly human rural communities being frequently targeted by scammy salespeople with offers that were too good to be true, Susana would have every reason to be wary of what Aurora was saying, even with the history book she was holding as proof. The relaunch shows how Aurora proved that she was the real deal, and how the friendship between her and Susana started.

Embracing new limits, and breaking old ones

The most often I could reliably update was one page a week. Less eventful pages could still take several hours each and were less fun to draw. When there was only a week in between updates, it could take months to get to the next significant event. Page sizes had a self-imposed limit. I could've made them larger or smaller, but I preferred consistency, right down to keeping the chapter lengths the same.

These limits that were meant to help with pacing, but sometimes hindered it, and caused me frustration when making pages. As I got to writing the script near the end of a chapter, I often needed to compress or cut out scenes, and pad out others to meet those requirements. These decisions were difficult, and took extra time in a long production process.

Some of the less eventful scenes could’ve been put into the narration, but I wanted to not have pages with huge blocks of narration that took up most of the space. I also had to consider how to meet the goal of ending each chapter on a punchline, a cliffhanger, or a conclusion.

The webtoon format will let me break those limitations. Large narration is more accepted in webtoons because they have a lot more panels per episode, that I could condense scenes that need it. There won’t be a set number of panels per episode.

Limits I have to embrace in the webtoon format are limiting the panel layouts, and lowering the width of the images. I’ll miss playing around with panel layouts as much as I could when drawing pages. It could still be done, but for the sake of time, I’d sacrifice that to produce a lot more panels per update.

The challenges and excitement ahead

A set schedule isn't guaranteed at this time, but I'm hoping that the switch to the webtoon format will help streamline the production process after redoing the parts from chapter 1. Redoing chapter 1 has been a very difficult part because many new panels were drawn for new scenes, and other scenes were cut out or re-arranged, but these episodes will be a lot more polished.

I attempted to adapt it into a webtoon as early as 2018, but it started out as being a lot more difficult and was put on hold for several months at a time. It became easier when I resumed development of it a few months ago and it gave an opportunity to make tweaks to the beginning to make it more polished. I feel sure that it'll allow me to write and draw this story more efficiently after getting used to the process.

A rough start can be forgiven in webcomics and webtoons, but since I'm going back to the start, it's the perfect opportunity to rework the beginning to have a stronger impact than it did.

These are my goals with the relaunch: To streamline the production process without sacrificing quality, and to keep refining Magical Renegades to make it shine!

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