Production Logs

This week I started out with finishing up some leftover shading tasks and general polishing on Rex. Then I picked up the Bird character for some initial shading tests.

Beside some maintenance work on all characters, this week Ellie's face rig is "finished" and ready for feedback.

This week I kept exploring sprite village and how sprites live and influence nature around them with a little bit of gardening. Also I explored how salt melts sprite faces off!

This week I continued set dressing the Mushroom Grove set, cleaning up the arrangement, colors and scattering of nature assets.

Updated Rex with new eyeball geometry, reshaped Rex's shoes, Ellie eyebrows topology addressed, Ellie clothing retopology in progress.

I spend a couple days on other tasks like Blender Feedback and uploading Blender Cloud content but the rest of the time I sculpted the bird to a state that its pretty much final and can go into retopology. This also included an alternative shape with the wings closed and some basic expressions we need for the film. These sculpts and expressions were then used for discussions between me and Simon & Met for how to solve shading, grooming and rigging issues.

During this week I mostly work on the animation on Rex walking over the log

At the start of the week I cleaned up and shared more production files, in this case the expression test sculpting files. Apart from that I got accustomed to and started working on the environment asset library and one of our first sets, the mushroom grove. The main focus here was to simplify the plants we already have, polish them up and create more variations to use for set dressing.

This week I mainly worked on figuring out the skin shading for our characters. I also looked into other shading details like adding displacement to Rex's sweater vest. A bit more of my time was dedicated to the geometry nodes project that I am also involved in.

My week was split halfway between setting up the rendering for our Rex animation tests and more hair grooming on Rex. Since the set-up of shots is slightly different using the new override system, it posed its own unique challenges that needed to be sorted out.

Reviewed all character eyes and implemented a standard. Ellie's clothing in progress. Retopologized the sole.

Last week I started animating on the very first production shot of the movie :D !! It's exciting to getting started on a fairly simple shot, but at the same time challenging to push the facial expressions of Rex burping. I've got to admit, I had to drink a few beers to dive into the character and make sure these burps are accurately represented. :P

What happens to a butterfly when it flies over a BBQ grill? Concept art! And some explorations of sprite village and elder sprite's tree.

A huge chunk of this week was spent troubleshooting a wide variety of things on Rex, CloudRig, even Blender itself. But the main goal was to make progress on Ellie's face rig, which is getting there!

During these last weeks I worked on a small animation trying to introduce Rex

During this week I prepared all the latest sculpting files for the cloud since all character sculpts are now final and approved. More tweaks and updates were made to the comparative expression sheets to put a final stamp on them as well and have everything ready for further tests in the animation. Most of the week I worked on the animal lineup by blocking the first iterations of them so that the general proportions and design can be judged and approved before moving on to sculpt them in detail.

Hair! Rex is our first character to be completely modeled, so this week my task was to start styling his hair. After wrapping up some environment modeling tasks, I also worked on the look development lighting setup we can use to compare and unify the characters' shading.

Last week I revisited the animation dialogue test I started a while ago with Rex. Now that the facial rig is in a solid state I was able to animate the facial features including lipsync and expressions. This is a great way to explore Rex's personality and test if the rig is production ready. This will also give us insights on whether to animate the shots on 1s or 2s. Which version do you prefer?

Completed retopology of Ellie's hair, body, trousers. Added 'iris grow' and 'iris shrink' shape keys to Rex's eyes and Ellie's eyes. Retopology of remaining clothing pieces in progress.

One post-final round of polish for Rex at the start of the week before diving into rigging the freshly retopo'd face of Ellie! Starting with some long-overdue scripting to make my life easier.

This week I mostly spent integrating the grooming file into our character pipeline to allow Andy to smoothly start his work on grooming Rex's hair. Check out the video where I explain and demo this process further.

This week was entirely dedicated to this concept painting of the kids meeting elder sprite exploring color contrast, light and shading both of the kids and the forest assets.

I came back from holidays this week and was greeted by the finished retopology for Rex. So I took this opportunity to do a full UV unwrapping pass on the new topology so we have grounds to do the actual shading on.

For this first week since I am back from the holidays I wrapped all the main character with only minor tasks left to do. All the teenagers and the sprites are signed off and the files cleaned up so that they are ready for retopology. This also means that more sculpting files will be uploaded to the Cloud for people to download.

Last week I spent my time exploring several sprite activities. When Ellie encounters the sprite village, what does she actually see? This is an ongoing conversation with Matthew (director) to explore habits, games and chores for the sprites to be busy with. Here you see a few of these explorations listed. Do you have an idea what sprites might be up to in their natural habitat?

This week I mostly focused on designing the environment of the mushroom grove and sprite village. What are the sprites actually up to all day? I also started a new piece of concept art that further defines what we established in the colorscript. And a snail got to express itself!

Updated Rex's rig helper face mesh. Completed retopology on Ellie's head with inner mouth, teeth, rig helper face mesh, and shape key tests; Ellie's head is ready for rigging. Retopologized the hands of time.

The first week of the year was spent on getting Rex closer to a "final" state, with grinding down the TODO list for him and addressing the final bits of animator feedback (until more comes up, of course).

This week I did more environment asset work to prepare the first sets. Simultaneously, the development on Blender's Geometry Nodes system is ramping up, so I really wanted to give this a go and see how we can utilize it for the forest!