Production Logs

In preparation for the screening of the WIP movie at the Blender Conference I spent a lot of time together with Andy and Clément to make sure that we could render every shot with little to no glitches (which was a challenge). Other than that there were many surfaces still to get a first/more detailed pass, so I went through a lot of those. Otherwise I focused on the progression of the distress stages of Einar.

In the past few weeks I've been working together with Simon to get the movie ready for the screening at Blender Conference 2022. This involved polishing lighting, adding smoke, fire and compositing effects.

I worked on the muzzle flash fx, gave Einar finally an initial pass to all surfaces, including much more detail, like fuzz and did a pass on the maximum distress version of Einar with bruises, sweat and dirt.

I finally got around to do a pass on the shading of the security guard, which we see in just a few but quite close up shots. That also included doing some embroidery and shading for his ID card. Then I also worked on the FX for the bullet impacts. I created an asset that uses my previous geometry nodes setups to layer sparks, flying debris and dust clouds for the generic bullet impact we need to easily add in a lot of shots. Apart from that I spent some time on helping out with designing the logo for the Blender conference.

I continued the work on the factory exterior shots this week. There was a detail pass on 020 and 030 received animated steam to liven up the shot. The biggest amount of work was in 080_escape since the time of day has changed significantly compared to the earlier scenes. Also, cars were added and had to be integrated into the still image. The fire is still temporary and has to be refined further.

Wrapping up the machine destruction shots that will receive additional fire and light fx. Also reworking the factory floor by adding more detail to the overhead conveyor section. Adding detail to the bots and arms to hold the bots into position.

I added the pink paint splash to the security bot and started working on the security guard room

As we are wrapping up animation next week, we're fully into polishing mode. We are looking at every shot and see where we can improve the quality of the animation as much as possible. Here are a couple of sequence progression videos comparing different stages of animation.

Here are some scene progression of the sequences I've been animating