Production Recap June 19th to 23rd

Last week on Pet Projects…

After some Annecy shenanigans (which should be documented in another post soon), the Studio team came back to work for the last sprint on Pet Projects. That is, Mack Bo and Nick didn't start working while the rest of us were tanning in the Alps -uh- talking about Blender to people at an international animation festival. Rik remained available during the afternoon so Mack Bo could receive feedback and get briefed on new shots.

What happened in the past few days then?

Animation is done and approved for two thirds of the shots! It feels great to be able to share this, as Pablo, Mack Bo and Rik have worked hard to push the shots forward. The beginning has been rocky as the rigs were quite difficult to get to work, with so many back and forth with Demeter. Now things are way smoother and, I swear, the animators are having fun! We can't wait for you to see all they put into each shot. Some frames are hilarious, they're really pushing the characters to the limit.

Lighting is well underway, Andy and Beau are even holding their horses as best as they can! As there wasn't a lot of new animation shots done during our week in Annecy, both our lighting artists worked on retakes from previous feedback, debugging files that were broken (mysteriously, I might add), as well as setting up some shots not yet approved in animation. Anticipating, but not too much though. The past experience on the project has proven that too much anticipation doesn't really work - things change, tweaks happen and the files don't match anymore.

Thus, Andy switched for a couple of days to another task: adding more details into the sets. He made an add-on to package Simon's hand drawn Geo Node lines and make it easier to use into individual shots. it may be subtle however it adds a lot of character and value to the final images. In the mean time, Simon worked on some more shading tweaks before he had to take a couple of days off the project. With the release of Blender 3.6, he had to create some content to share, which always takes some time.

Fx and matte paintings are still in progress, with hopes to finish the latter by the end of the month. Still a duo effort by Vivien and Julien, the clouds demand at least 3 passes per shot before they can be called done: a rough painting for placement, creation of the 3D objects, then the paintover.

By the end of June, Rik aims to send the locked edit to Mariana so our composer can work on the final music. Fingers crossed, and more news next week!

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Pet Projects is currently in production and the progress can be followed here on the Blender Studio website.

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