Production Logs

This week I worked on various improvements to existing sets and assisting with lighting tasks.

This week the animation team has continued working on the 'Intro' sequence. Monica Eggert, Daniella Aviles, Pablo Fournier and Rik Schutte are chewing away the big shots on this one. We've planned to finish up this sequence by the end of next week. Next to that, Phil has been done in rigging and I took some time to do some test posing on this character. Feast your eyes!

To catch up a bit I finished the lighting for Nightfall and started working on Snacks. For the next two weeks I will be working on set dressing and lighting Snacks.

More lighting and simulation! This week I was still busy with the fluid sims of 120_drown which finally end up behaving. 090_yew got a first pass in lighting and some set dressing (more to come next week!) and the main shot of Sprite Village in 030_village got its first pass, exciting!

This week I've been animating my first shot from _village_. In this shot ellie finds the home of the sprites. The other animators working on this sequence are Gerard, Ruth and Mack!.

This week I finished some started prop shading on the tent and its bag, did a full shading pass on the boombox and did a bunch of general work on preparing Jay for a full shading pass incl. his distressed version.

This week there was a lot of set work for the Nightfall and Snacks sequences. The mushroom grove set was mostly wrapped. Apart from that there were many small tasks to compliment the current lighting and shading work.

This week we've officially started the first sequence of the movie: Intro! In this sequence the characters are introduced and their relationships established. A lot of performance is going into these shots to make sure we convince the audience to get hooked to the story at this point. This is currently in development by Pablo Fournier, Monica Eggert, Daniella Ailves and Rik schutte.

Besides the usual fixing of issues that are popping up here and there, this week I mostly continued my marathon of shading the props that we need in the shots that are currently being lit. That includes the different snacks with packaging, the campfire, the backpack, the sleeping bags, the BBQ grill + utensils, the binoculars and the tent, which still needs to be finished up. But overall this was a highly productive week for me.

This week I worked on both, the lighting for 130_snacks (which will be passed over to Beau in the coming week) and the lighting and fluid simulation for 120_drown. The fluid sim is going to be a major task for the upcoming weeks, so stay tuned for more updates!

This week, we had the kick-off of Village. In this sequence, the group is introduced to the very happy and friendly sprites. The rowdy group is amazed by them but they also see an oppurtunity. We are also introduced to the jolly Elder Sprite, who welcomes them into their village. We establish who these little guys are and the interaction between the 2 groups The Animators working on this are Gerard Manresa Ortega, Mack Bo Ross, Rick Schutte and Ruth Taylor

Phil's face rig is now finished!!! That means the final difficult rigging challenge on this project is now behind me, and all that's left is maintenance, polish, props, and other janitorial duties. This is good. Time to rest.

This week, my goal was set dressing/lighting the Nightfall sequence. We made some progress, but hopefully the lighting and all the extra's added will be done before the next production log.

This week I was animating a couple of shots of the 'Drown' sequence. I hope you like it!

This week, together with Pablo Fournier, we've finished the animation on the 'Yew' sequence. It was fun to animate Jay in a panick run and come up with clumsy ideas of him climbing into the hollow tree. We can't wait to see this one lit and rendered :D. Next to that I've been working on a marketing pose of Victoria. These will be done for every character.

I worked on more lighting for 130_snacks! Now, the majority of that sequence should have its first pass. Further, I did particle effects for the salt sprinkles and smoke simulation for the Sprite melting shots. I also did a first small pass of 120_drown, but more on that next week!

For the first half of this week I spent a majority of time on doing a full pass on the Sprite melting FX for the snacks sequence. The rest of the week I started catching up with prop shading, going through the different salty snacks that the Sprites are being attacked with and doing a shading pass on them and their packaging.

This week Mònica and I have finished Nightfall sequence!! We're still missing the sleep animation on Phil on the first shot but we will do that just when he is ready to animate and come to life Hope you like it!

This week I added the final touches to my last 3 shots for the drown seqs. Did some polish here and there and we got these bad boys/girls all finaled. Woot Woot! Now its time to dive on to the next shot :) Lets get it.

Some CloudRig hacking and finally got started on Phil's face rig, which is the final character whose face will be rigged for this production! Pretty exciting. No prop rigs this week, absolutely remarkable!

There was a lot of work on the Mushroom Grove set this week and all of its extensions. The environment asset library also got extended.

This week I continued working on the village. I posed all the characters out and split the scene in 3 parts. I got Part A and started to animate on it.

With all the character models now completed, my focus this week was on creating some props. Modeled the 'bloody shoe' inspired by the classic '80s Reebok high top, Phil's BBQ 'lighter fluid', and the chomped-on 'snail leaf'. All have been approved and are ready for the next steps!

I worked on some additional sets that are only necessary for single shots in the beginning. Some more adjustments to previous set were also done. A lot of propos were also finished and handed over to rigging and shading while the library of trash assets still needs to be finalized.

This week was mostly about effects. I did the hairspray effects for the spray sequence and made a lot of progress on the melting sprite effects. Other than that I worked together with Andy on the lookdev for Elder Sprite and I still had a lot of discussions about the geometry nodes design, following last week's node workshop here in Amsterdam.

Hey!! This week Gerard and I are continuing with "Nightfall" sequence, and we're almost there!! We are having so much fun with this one, so we hope you like it :D

This week we continue on finishing up the animation of the 'Drown' sequence. Next to that, I've been doing an animation demo on how to animate a simple shot.

Beard time! Apart from doing an initial lighting on 040_nightfall and 130_snacks, I also worked on Elder Sprite's fluffy beard.

This week I haven been assigned to place and pose the sprites and little creatures in the village. I've started by placing them in the scene based on a sketch that Matthew made. I also added extra props that were needed. After that I started posing and grouping all Sprites in little groups. It's real fun making all these little scenes with 1 big scene.

This week the animation team almost finished snack sequence and I managed to get started on yew before the week finished.

Prop rigs! They actually take very little time, and the majority of this week was spent massaging every vertex of Phil's big beautiful body, and I also snuck in some time for CloudRig code quality improvements.

This week, my goal was to finish the lighting for the Spray sequence and start with the Nightfall sequence. Aside from lighting shots I have created a freshly baked set of packaging labels.

This week I continued kept on the snack sequence and finally I could finish my shots. I hope you like it!