Author notes

297 - Descent

El Cid

on Feb. 20, 2020

I think at least part of the reason why it took me so long to pick this comic back up, was because I was dreading doing this exact page. Some of the most grueling exercises in 3D art – for me, at least – are trying to do convincing cityscapes and crowded environments with lots of people milling about. This page crams together a lot of things that I just hate doing. And for all the work that went into it, I can't say I'm 100 percent happy with how it turned out.

So what the heck are we even looking at here? Well, I wanted the scene to open up with a dramatic sequence of images illustrating where it takes place. The first panel shows the entrance to the *Vol: a gaping chasm on Triton's surface leading to the underground city. The second panel is an outside view of the city, which you can see is submerged in a subsurface ocean and spinning (yeah, I know, the spinning effect didn't turn out so well). The third is a view of the city itself, and then in the last panel we're waiting in line at what I guess is some sort of customs booth? I probably should have put a sign there explaining what it is. Not the greatest execution ever.

Oh, and the reason the city is spinning is because that's one way to simulate heavier gravity on a low gravity environment like a moon. By building everything on an incline and spinning the city, you get a similar effect to the centrifugal force which creates artificial gravity on spacecraft and orbital colonies. Here's a crappy animation to show what it looks like, soft of.



Sorry about the animation. The city is procedurally generated, and I didn't anticipate that the buildings would crowd and jitter like that. Apparently their location is determined by their distance (or angle?) relative to the camera or something like that, so they don't hold still. At least I think that's what's going on there. Anyway, I didn't have time to figure out how to fix it and re-render the animation, so we're stuck with it. It probably takes a lot of energy to spin an entire city, but I figure they use currents to help with it. The low temperature environment combined with their need to dump waste heat probably creates a self-solving problem for them? I dunno, I try not to get too caught up on the nuts and bolts of this stuff.

The next page will have actual stuff happening, sort of.





“Vol” is short for “Voluntary Coexistence Sector.” They're sort of like sanctuary cities for all laws whatsoever. Similar to the surveillance-free Designated Confidentiality Zones, the Vols formed as a reaction to the ever-pervasive surveillance state and aggressive policing practices and can be found all throughout the solar system. While it probably sounds like a Mad Max nightmare, the Vols are typically founded around Rousseauan humanist principles and tend to be largely self-policed, in a certain sense even better than the colonies. However, many have become havens for criminal organizations and some are nothing more than violent hedonistic theme parks. Overall, Vols can be a nice place to live if you can afford good personal security, but they do have a somewhat predictable life cycle. When things start going downhill, pack your bags and leave. The end is always ugly.