Production Logs

This week I kept pushing the background island to feature more detail and some trees and started the clouds composition for that shot as well.

This week I've been refining the shots on 240 into the abyss. These shots required a lot of manual tweaking, getting the shards buildup feeling right and animating mikassa full body. I'll be checking the latest renders of these shots to look for discrepancies and intersections in order to do a final pass, adressing all of these minor bumps.

Continued making mockups for the breakdown of Mikassa but also tried another method where I show off Mikassa's design progression.

I worked on different Fixes on the whale, making sure that the inner parts of Mikassa's model are not visible through the shard gaps and some overall shading tweaks.

This week Simon worked on the shards for the whale and Mikassa's light-body. I updated the lighting in 250_whale and 260_return to give them a soft internal glow and tweaked the lighting on the characters to make them slightly more readable. I also added the water surface to the shots in 230_sinking and tweaked the kelp animation in the first establishing shots.

We finalized the shard pattern of the whale and I worked on putting this together with the light body in the actual character rig so we can use it in the shots properly.

This week I started working on the background island shading and drew the first 3D brushstroke clouds for the opening sequence.

this week I worked on a couple of shots from seq 210, spending most of the time in the most challenging shot of this seq, the mid shot of her locking the wheel and pulling the rope

Apart from finishing another project, I've been continueing working on 240_0020, animating shards and shards and shards by hand. fun times! It's coming along, and nice to see the renders!

Created mockups of the breakdown scene for Mikassa.

Besides some involvement in Blender development I spend most of the time this week on making sure the light body version of Mikassa is merged properly into the character rig and a lot of performance optimization that needed to go along with that.

Almost all shot of the showcase reel have some level of animation, so I was able to preview render most of them as they are being worked on. 220_storm got some lighting adjustments (but this scene is highly dependent on the sky and island backgrounds) I also worked on the set dressing of 250_whale.

Animated the three shots in sequence 220 (it's almost ready).

blocked out two shot in the abyss, Mikassa is broken apart and is recollecting herself to get back up.

this week i finished 260 and 250, both of them showcasing Mikassa and her interaction with the whale. Also i was in charge to try different animation approaches on the boat animation. I tried with the boat being animated on 1s (every frame), on 2s (problems of strobing because the camera is animated every frame) and finally animated on 2s but with the boat baked to the camera on the inbetweens, this allow us to keep the 2s feeling but instead the boat stays in the same part of the frame, so you dont have any strobing.

We finally have some animation blocking, so my job this week was to re-render scenes and give the characters a first rough lighting pass. Especially 230_sinking got a lot of refinements, albeit some rendering errors as well.

Been mostly working on the editoral, but I've also now transitioned into animating a few shots myself.

I spent some time iterating over the ocean surface and making a setup of controls for the storm and the calm version and worked on the whale shard pattern using the animation that we have of the whale now.

This week I've spent most of my time pre-lighting the layout of the finished segments of the reel. In the "sailing" and "storm" sequences, Simon worked on the ocean surface so I could give them another pass of more detailed lighting. The sets are still being worked on heavily!

This week we've been shifting gears towards animation the first couple of sequences. I've been assigned sequence 230 where Mikassa, no matter what she tries, sinks down to the bottom. We want to block out the entire sequence first, to get feedback on the hookups and flow of the sequence as a whole.

This week I've been animating the seq260, giving a pass on the whale animation