Production Logs

The focus was on 'One' and his eye region. But there was also plenty of other progress on his general design and fine tweaking of 'Critter'.

This week I tested the early version of Critter's rig as much a possible to give feedback. I went over the current version of the film and cherry-picked poses that felt important to try out and tried to replicate them with the rig. I also made some swimcycles using the rig, both calm and panicked.

I mostly worked on the design and sculpts of secondary creatures that populate the ice belt and did paintovers for One and Critter.

I spent most of this week (besides fighting with bugs) working more on the shading of Critter. We're in the process of layering more and more elements to make the shading look painterly and nice.

More Critter, now and for the foreseeable future.

This week I was testing Critter's shading in the environment as well as blocking out various sets for the ending of the film. (Spoilers!)

I finally also jumped on the project to help with the visual exploration/look development. For now I added some shading effects to nudge the look of the ice belt set in the right direction and started doing an initial shading pass on Critter, to see where we can take that. It's looking very psychedelic space gummy bear right already!

This week our goal is to get a 'shot' of the film as final as possible, which is always a magical moment in any production. I supported Simon's shading endeavors by providing an initial pass of brush strokes for the massive Ice Shard library. Additionally I wanted to do some tests with Blender's dynamic paint system to come up with a 2.5D paint-smearing effect that can be layered into the background of our shots to mimic a watercolor look.

The sculpting was mainly about refining the general proportions and idea of the body elements around the cap and eyes and the long bok-choy like drapes extruding from One.

I explored eye designs and started a new massive painting of One. I also created some watercolor textures that we can use for the move, that I used in the bg and on One's leafy tentacles.

More Critter body rig feedback, and unexpected add-on maintenance due to Blender 5.0 changing how add-on properties are accessed and written.

The Ice Belt set is ready for lookdev and can even be put in shots for test renders. I also did some test renders with Julien's Jellyfish sculpt to get an idea of the look of the character.

This week I continued on exploring One alongside the 3D progress on the character.

I started on Singularity this week, as Critter landed on my desk, begging to be rigged. I decided to do a semi-random livestream on YouTube, so everyone could see me figure out how to rig a monster creature with pretty much no plan going into it. The result was promising, but far from final! You can find a link to the livestream recording inside the post.

I started working together with Vivien and Andy on figuring out the general design of One, the giant jellyfish-planet being.

This week I started to properly explore the massive jellyfish creature, that takes up a lot of the screen time and space of this short film!

I'm still working on getting the set file of the Ice Belt ready for shot building and animation. I've spent most of my time this week sculpting ice shards and writing a script to automate rigging hundreds of shards.

My first small task kicking off work on Singularity was creating a simple setup for Julien to create frilled tendrils using curves.