Sorry, this is one of those “blah” pages with no structure to it. Clearly, the page should have ended on panel six; that was the more natural stopping point, as this page is mainly about Abby and Delilah being reunited. While planning the pages, I felt the need to have at least one panel showing that the other two condemned are completely disoriented and trying to find their bearings.
Very sparse with the text here, because I felt the visuals told everything. Delilah clearly didn't fare as well as Abby did with her jailers. Also, you may have noticed something different about how the characters are rendered in those first few panels. That's because I tweaked their material settings to utilize some subsurface scattering (SSS) effects. It's really subtle, but it makes a slight difference, as you can (maybe) see in this side-by-side comparison:
Yeah, like I said, it's subtle. The main difference is that subsurface scattering gives the skin a slight glow, which softens the shadows and adds some translucence in thin areas, like the fingers and ears. The most obvious way to spot SSS in any 3d art is to look at the ears. But while it does add a little something, it's not perfect: you'll notice that Abby's makeup is supposed to be dark around her eyes, but with SSS enabled, that's mostly lost. That can be tweaked, but ultimately I figured it's not worth doubling my render times just to get slightly better materials… which I'm then going to mostly lose after I run the artwork through Photoshop. So the last panel does not have SSS, and I probably won't be using it too often going forward.
Thankfully, as always, I have a solution. You can thank me later… no, actually you can thank me now. The solution to this problem is…
police robots.
Think about it. With police robots, you'll never have to worry about police brutality, discrimination, wrongful shootings, corruption… all the problems introduced by giving humans too much arbitrary power will immediately disappear when we hand this responsibility over to machines, and no new problems will be introduced.
Okay, obviously, I'm being facetious; police robot technology still has a long way to go, but police robots are a real thing, and they're currently patrolling in several U.S. cities. They're mostly limited to menial patrol duties and surveillance, and don't carry weapons. There are also robot assistants being designed to carry out traffic stops while the officer remains safely in their patrol vehicle, and of course we're all familiar with bomb squad robots. I think, in their current state, robots are still best relegated to a support role, but the time may not be far away when a fully automated police vehicle pulls you over for speeding and emails you a speeding ticket, or a robot meter maid issues you a parking citation.
I will confess I think the major cities talking about defunding their police departments is more than a little bit of an overreaction, but if they're serious about that, then increased automation is an obvious direction to go. I wouldn't want to live in the first city to try this sort of experiment, but I would be interested in seeing it play out. I can just barely make out the shadow of a system that might work with very minimal actual police personnel involved. Who knows, it could free up resources to address other root causes of crime, or allow the police to focus more on the handful of truly dangerous offenders in their population? On the other hand, it could also backfire. In such a system, you're probably executing a lot fewer arrests, which means offenders stay on the streets, which means they offend more. You're basically issuing a lot of robo citations and trusting people to show up for court, which they won't, so now guys with guns have to go out and break their doors down. Whether that adds up to a better policing system than what we currently have, there's really no way to guess until somebody tries it. I mean, what's the worst that can happen, right!
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