Production Logs

This week I mainly worked on the Sprite Village Set. The general blocking is done with some adjustments to existing assets and now it gets more into making the assets work better together and working out the ground.

Completed retopology on Elder Sprite. Maintained some consistency within the Sprite species. Finalized head, beard, teeth, inner mouth, eyebrows, mustache, and rig helpers. Ready for the next steps.

Since animation ramps up pretty soon, three new sets are being prepared for the following scenes: 060_scratch, 070_homerun and 100_haircut. In addition to that, I continued rendering shots from 110_rextoria as animation gets updated and did a few random lookdev tests!

This week animation team continue working on their shot on the rextoria sequence

I spent last week mostly animating shots on the rextoria sequence, you can check them out on Pablo's post. But i managed to squeeze out a quick walkcycle of the spider and sprite together inbetween.

I added a new feature to the `Grease to Mesh` addon that we need for the smear frames and started covering the whackamole set in spiderwebs.Otherwise I was quite busy with other things outside the project that were popping up this week, like Blender development and a promotional render for the announcement of Cycles X.

This week was mostly spent on getting started with Victoria's face rig, but beside that I did some health check-ups across production files such as cleaning up orphan data and library override leftovers and also testing viewport performance. There were also some minor tweaks and fixes to the Sprite's rig.

This week I was wrapping up work on the sleeping bags. These are modeled directly into shape for the shots where they are needed, with additional shapes to alternate between. The backpack also got a small update with the latest sleeping bags added to it.

Started Elder Sprite retopology. Focused on mesh re-use of the already corrected Sprite meshes and transformed them into Elder Sprite for modeling, rigging, surfacing efficiency and consistency.

This week I started shading on the new Victoria model by quickly transferring the temporary shading to have a simple basis for rendering. Other than that I gave the outdated ground shading on the whackamole set some love, investigated some rendering issues. And at the end of the week I turned the script that I made to convert grease pencil strokes into mesh sequences into an addon, so that we can use it in production.

I continued to light shots on the 110_rextoria scene. In addition to that I started preparing the set for 070_homerun so we can start animation as soon as possible!

This week I spend more time on various assets but mainly the backpack and sleeping bags. I will be able to show more next week.

This week animation team continue working on their shot on the rextoria sequence

This is already the second week of rough lighting on the rextoria scene. Since the animation of these shots is progressing and the sets are being built, we can already start setting up the scene for lighting. Right now I'm focusing on overall mood and style - trying to interpret the color script as good as possible.

A short week with only 3 days for me, and even a solid half of that I spent with poking developers about making Blender gooder, but in the other half worked a bit on Victoria and learned a bunch about the Override system so I can better understand how to troubleshoot and give feedback on it.

This week I did another pass over the spiderweb shading, adjusted some general shading as a result from Andy's shot renderings and did a first test to cover Rex in snails with geometry nodes.

Completed Victoria for the Rextoria sequence push. Ready for the next steps; rigging, surfacing, grooming. Finalized her upper body, head, eyebrows, eyelashes, teeth, tongue, and rig helper face mesh.

Last week I worked mostly on the rextoria sequence, finishing up some shots and starting new ones. These can be found in Pablo's log. Next to other things I also made sure the sprites poses are holding up well when animating.

This week I worked on various assets like Sprite teeth shapes and props but mainly I was occupied with Blender development.

This week was split between working on CloudRig, addressing feedback and new features on the Sprite, and then getting started with rigging Victoria (neck down).

This is the updated week version of the rextoria sequence

Completed Victoria's hair and eyes, upper body is in progress. Created Sprite's alternate 'evil eyebrows'.

This week I looked into the spiderweb in terms of material and shading for additional layers to make it more dimensional and fluffy. Also I created procedural variations for the salty snacks with geometry nodes to give some some variety, as there are going to be several of them in single shots.

Last week was mostly animating on shots in the rextoria sequence. These updates are included in the edit uploaded by Pablo Fournier. Next to that I tested some sprite expressions that you can check here. Matthew decided to add 'sharp' teeth to the sprites to add to the scary look of these evil creatures.

Final paintwork on the Sprite village got done and a quick prop design got added to the pile of prop designs ready to go further down the pipeline