Production Logs

For this week I sculpted the rest of the animals. Only very little work needs to be done anymore so most of the animals can go into retopology. I also made a first stream on Thursday to show my sculpting process and a bit of behind the scenes on the production.

I've been working on the sprite village concept, finally moving into color and tested how we can make our very green sprites stand out in a very green setting.

This week I started blocking out the set for the showdown between Rex, Victoria and the Sprites and rendered the sculpted and simulated sire tests.

Sprite retopology in progress, completed head and torso, includes a timelapse.

Besides some technical problem solving regarding facial rigs, I had time to test the 'Yellow Wagtail'. A beautiful bird that can be found in the southern parts of England and also happens to have caught a significant role in the film ;). Then lastly I posed some characters for promotion material.

Last week I was wrapping up transferring all the temporary shading to the new Ellie topology, as there was still some geometry to UV unwrap. Also I extended our color library for all the character's colors and some new features.

The most important character gets a rig: Mister Snail. I can't wait to see what sort of adventures he will get up to in this beautiful snail-based shortfilm about a snail.

Mainly I worked on the retopology of the snail this week but I also spent a lot of time editing and rendering out more walkthrough videos from working on the Snail.

This week I jumped back and forth between scattering assets inside the mushroom grove set and fire tests.

This week I could finally focus some time on actually transferring the shading data on Ellie's new topology. There is still some more work to do wrap her shading up, because there were also a bunch of other things popping up. For example, I made some general shader tweaks for Eevee, particle hair and helped Rik more with his sculpted fire tests.

Completed eyes on both Sprite and Elder Sprite (includes a timelapse). Sprite's retopology in progress. Addressed request on Ellie’s fannypack. Deleted hidden inner geometry on Ellie’s jacket, boots, and handkerchief.

During this week I had to make an animation to try the different fire effect in movement, so we went for a Sprite dancing

I started the week by adding poses of Rex to the library. Next to that we continued exploring the possibilities of 'stylized' fire. In this case I was asked to animate 'drawn' fire and attach it to the animation test made by Pablo Fournier. Check the progress here of what steps I took to create the fire.

Ellie's rig got a lot of bells and whistles this week. Their sound really won't help with hiding from those little green dudes.

This week in rigging: Implemented first round of feedback on Ellie's body, some potentially final improvements to Rex's face rig, and got started on the Bird!

This week for me was a bunch of putting out fires in terms of pipeline, but also putting on fires to render out the fire tests we worked on in the previous week to have a comparative preview, together with Andy. Other than that there was some more Ellie shading going on in the background and a bit of geometry nodes for me, as always.

For the sculpting process of the snail I took the time to record and commentate the entire process to give more insight into my workflow and some behind the scenes on the creation process of the snail, the animal character lineup and previous finished characters in general. The .blend file and final results can also be found on the Asset Progression folders as always.

I spend most of the week setting up the fire comparisons together with Simon. Much of the work was debugging why files don't work on the farm and transferring the fire simulation into a setting which let's us compare the different techniques and make a judgement on which animation and effects style we will go for in this film.

Last week I continued to work on Ellie's facial expressions while going back and forth together with the rigging department improving the rigs where needed. Next to that I did some adjustments to the 'camping test shot' by blocking out the other characters. I'll revisit that shot once we have some proper rig updates on Jay, Victoria and Phil.

Revised collar on denim jacket, created two versions of her fannypack, retopologized her alternate hair cut, and created iris perspective corrective shapes. Ellie is finalized and ready for the next steps; rigging, surfacing, grooming.

This week I kept exploring sprite village after we decided to give the sprites a bit more craftiness and then I switched to designing versions of our characters beaten up by the environment.

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