Production Logs

This week I mainly worked on the identity for Blender Conference 2024, so there was only little GOLD work being done. I received the coral reef breakdown from Hjalti and added lights and a compositing buildup to present a simplified view on how the set and shots are constructed.

This week more GP animation happened. We are almost done with all the shots that get this extra treatment.

My work this week was mostly focused on rendering out all the remaining shots in high/final quality, error fixes, last minute lighting tweaks and compositing in the 2D paint effects from Vivien and Rik.

This week I mostly did handpainted Grease Pencil animation to add smudge and smear effects over fast movements and some more glow effects for Mikassa's lightbody form in the Abyss.

Besides wrapping up the golden light trail FX and some minor work on the first breakdown shots that we are making now I spent a lot of time this week on reviewing patches for Blender and also preparing some demo files for the upcoming release.

I worked on compositing of pretty much the entire reel: Adding paintover renders from Vivien and Rik in shots that had a paintover treatment, doing brightness tweaks to make Mikassa more readable and compositing the motion trails in 250_whale and 260_return in.

I worked mainly on the light trail of the whale this week, which is the last major FX work needed to finish the shots. This is almost done now, just a matter of implementing it in the remaining few shots.

This week I helped out with some concept art for the golden trail and also animated with Grease Pencil over two shots to test the workflow for adding in extra brushstrokes and fx by hand.

Adjusting the brush stroke jittering in certain sequences was my primary concern this week. I also merged the post paint-over work from Rik and Vivien into the compositing setups of their respective shots. I also separated the motion trail effects in 260_return into their own render passes and merged them back together in comp. The rest was just spent on reporting bugs and packing up the splash screen file for the Blender 4.2 release

This week I spent more time on experimenting with the different ways of implementing some additional brush stroke jittering to add more life to the picture and merge the style better with the ocean. This needed to be implemented in all the assets and shots and can now be tweaked on different levels for each individual shot.

Most of my time this week was spent on setting up a workflow that lets us paint over every single render with the geo nodes brush stroke tools AND in a non-destructive way. I made a bunch of scripts and a hook for our shot builder to enable this process. I've also uploaded a render of all the sequences with Simon's brush jittering effects.