This week I wrapped up the sculpting of the bird by addressing last feedback notes and testing the wing shapes and placement. Afterwards I retopologized the bird which is almost done. Next week I'll be able to move on to other animals.

It was finally time for Ellie's hair to be groomed. I transferred the hairdo from the 3D World Cover we did a while ago to her new geometry. After that I filled the missing pieces and continued with the 'cut' variant of her hair. I also managed to do some proof of concept smoke sim.

I've been going a bit back and forth with testing rigs, blocking some shots, revisiting old shots etc. Ellie's facial rig was ready for testing and it is working very well. Rex had some iterations I'm going to test this week. Next to that, I spend an afternoon exploring 'fire' by using the KeyMesh add-on to create a stylized 'sculpted' fire that could blend well with the design of the movie.

Most of the week was focused on Ellie's denim jacket with added collar. Collar silhouette is not final. A shape key was added as the solution to keep the collar hidden and out of the way when Ellie wears her neck handkerchief for most of the movie. Ellie's fanny pack is in progress. And Rex's eyes received iris perspective corrective shapes.

This week I dedicated some more time outside to the Geometry node project and specifically worked on some of the use-cases that we are going to use for the short directly. But I was also doing a bunch of technical tests of creating fire effects with mostly procedural methods and started transferring Ellie's shading to the new topology.

Ellie hair, Ellie face, Ellie body, with so much more Ellie on the horizon!

During this week I continued working on the logbridge shot, I added the other characters and started to work on Ellie's performance