Latest on Project Gold

I refined the trouser sculpt for retopology and continued with modeling the essential clothing elements. This was also used to test out new custom modifiers and tools to speed up the retopo process.

This week I've started to test the rig, giving feedback and creating a simple walkcycle with Mikassa. This gives us more insights about proportions and style. Keep in mind, the rig is still in progress and some deformations are still early stages.

I made some first explorations to see how we could implement Mikassa's light body, helped out Andy a little bit for his exploration on the Abyss environment and made a tool with Geometry Nodes for Julien to speed up his workflow.

This week I've mainly been working on exploring the 3D look of the abyss, in which a significant chunk if the movie will take place. The black goo (despair) is gone from the current version of the story, but I still wanted to reference the fluid shapes of Florent's earlier concept art. This style will be refined in the coming weeks.

This week i finished to thumbnail seq 120 so all the beats in that seq are "final"

The week started for me doing some shading tests on a static prop (the boat's steering wheel) to test out whether we can use the brush system to depict different kinds of materials. After that, we needed the giant rock formations of underwater layer 2 for the previz. I picked up on the previous coral generation ideas and prototyped some tools for generating their base meshes in a procedural way.

This week I finalized the general body topology of Mikassa. Some tweaks are still going to be made but this is now ready for more rigging and animation tests.

This week I've been continueing on storyboarding on sequence 11 and 12. Since there is no concept art regarding Mikassa in her 'ethereal' form, I've come up with some sketch to get that conversation started. Along with that I've experimented with 'real' cracking deformations and translating boards into 3d previs.

This week was the release of Blender 4.0, so I finished a video explaining the new node tools feature for Geometry Nodes. Then also I spent some time to finally put together a detailed blog post on the character shading of Wing It!. For Gold I just managed to test the reflection brush strokes a bit more and give us a more convenient way to control the flow direction with tools to mark edges in the model directly.

For me this week was quite productive: Both Jerrica and Florent visited our studio, so we had a lot of time to discuss aspects of our brush rendering style as well as character design decisions. I worked mainly on the brush details on the Mikassa test. We really wanted to push the detail further along to get a better idea of how much detail we can put into the models.

The main chunk of my week was taken up by the Geometry Nodes workshop that was happening, since this was the week that both Jacques and Hans were with us at the HQ in Amsterdam. Other than that it was also the week that Florent was here and Jerrica for part of it. So it was busy just in terms of meetings. But I did manage to also squeeze in some time for RnD on the brush strokes, testing additional texturing, trying them out on an existing animation test and experimenting with fake specular highlights.

This week I've been working on storyboarding seq 14 and 16, giving them a clean pass and getting them ready to be used in the edit

This week I've been tasked to start thumbnailing the opening scene of the movie. This has been changed quite a bit since the beginning and it was useful to see the sequence visualized for the first time. Next to that i also wrapped sequence 12, which contains Mikassa struggling upwards to leave her abyss. This is still an ongoing conversation since the role of the whale in this version is debatable.

Continued wrapping up the sculpting while the essential body retopology is being done.

Updated the previs/storyboard for scenes 15 and 17.

This week I continued storyboarding for Gold, visualizing the ideas from Jerrica and hand them over to her in order to put them into the edit. This sequence is called 'rock bottom' where Mikassa has hit literally rock bottom, but gets inspired by the whale to lift herself up again and put her broken pieces back together.