Production Logs

The beach set was my main focus this week. I started with the rough blocking I did previously and detailed the models, added brush strokes and shading. I also went through the rock library to add painterly shading and further iterated over the lighting in our test shot.

Since we have a first pass of brush strokes on Mikassa, I focused on doing the same thing for the boat this week, so that we can see everything together in our first test shot and then iterate based on that.

I further worked out the Underwater set in blocking and sculpting.

I continued with the shading of Mikassa, baking normals, filling up the remaining areas with brush strokes, adding in some detail on the clothing and making sure the brush strokes can deform properly. There still is lots to be done in terms of texture painting and creating different levels of detail, but this will be the highest LOD that we need for her full body.

This week I started creating kelp assets based on a crazy amount of brush scans from Vivien. I continued improving the Previz Camera Importer add-on and blocked out the lighting on our first test shot.

This week all of the fish and seagull are retopologized and ready for shading.

This week i worked mainly on the edit, also I did a hand test to check the deformations and will help with the cracking. Also I'm starting to do a animation test to try how will be the final look on a shot in the movie, I manage to do a layout/first really rough blocking to expose some animation beats.

This was my first week after the holiday break so things went a bit slow. Since we need to reference quite a few camera angles from previz during set construction, I wrote a very simple Importer to automatically load a selection of cameras from the previz files and align them neatly on the timeline.

I finally started with the actual shading work on the assets for production. First of all Mikassa, so that we can do more tests with animation and visual style. A bit of a slow start, since there were some kinks in our asset pipeline addon to iron out, but now we are set!

I focused on making a full test sculpt of the mixed set rocks as preparation for set work in the coming weeks. A couple of articles are also ready to be published soon.

Tested and iterated on the cracking and deformations for Mikassa based on Simon's geo node setup.

A shorter week for me in which I explored the abyss walls and the very last shot of our movie for the colorscript.

I worked on improving the cracking setup as Julien was iterating on the fracture pattern and making sure that everything works as he's using it. Other than that I picked up a few other tasks that were lying around on my backlog like more control for our brush stroke setup and work on our pipeline addons.

The whale model is mostly done. All main character modeling tasks are almost completed.

I've been working some more on RnD, focusing on the tools that we would need specifically for shading. For this I looked at the shading of our main fish character and did some more experimentation with Geometry Nodes, Grease Pencil 3, Eevee Next and Python.