After experimenting with loose brush strokes last week, I worked on doing initial tests for painterly shading of the surfaces themselves. At this point the setup is fully procedural and based on the tech we developed for 'Wing It!'.
We decided to create a test shot featuring the environment of Layer 1 of the ocean to test out our various modeling and shading ideas. I set up an initial scene that Simon and I can iterate on to try to nail the painterly style of this project,
With new Mikassa concept art coming in from Eliza Ivanova, I started sculpting and iterating on a the new design. The focus for now was on the face and body and slowly transitioning to the hair and outfit.
After wrapping up my leftover tasks for the release of 'Wing It!' and between several meetings following in the week, I finally kicked off my RnD work for Gold by focusing on the tool for brush strokes that we know we will need to pull off the painterly style.
Having worked on Gold a few months back (but then I helped out the Pets production) I was super excited to jump into the project again. I did some initial explorations for generating a mesh that can be used as sculpting base to create the gigantic distorted reef rocks of Layer 2 of the ocean. Also, I did some test setups with geo nodes to give easy control over the shapes of our coral models.